Gender Differences in Perceived Employability between University and VET Students: an analysis of Emerging Adults in Spain

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Introduction: Self-Perceived Employability (SPE) is composed of (1) the internal dimension, which includes self-efficacy, knowledge, skills, and individual motivation to find and keep a job; and the external dimension, which depends on the perception of the general state of the labour market, i.e., how a person perceives the demand for his or her professional profile at a given moment and time (Rothwell & Rothwell, 2017). Identifying which variables, affect the construction and maintenance of a healthy SPE is an interesting topic. It is especially interesting during emerging adulthood when the own perceptions of abilities to get a job will be a key part of emerging adult identity development (Arnett, 2004). Gender-based employment discrimination has been documented in a Spanish context (INJUVE, 2016, 2020), so it is interesting to know if there exist differences in self-perception of employability between men and women, especially in Spain where the youth unemployment rate is much higher than in other European countries, as well as the rate of job insecurity (Eurostat, 2020). Aim: To study the relationship between self-perceived employability and gender during emerging adulthood. Considering precarious employment, especially for emerging adults in Spain, this variable precarious employment was also introduced. Method: The sample was composed by 2919 emerging adults between the ages of 18 and 29 years. 1703 were university students (64.7% women; Mage = 20.61 SD = 2.49). 506 participants were VET students (37.9% women; Mage = 20.21, SD = 2.48). To measure SPE, we used the Spanish version (Vargas et al., 2018) of SPE's Original Scale (Rothwell et al, 2008). To evaluate precarious employment, we create an ad hoc subscale. Descriptive analysis and regression analysis were carried out. Results and discussion: Among university students, female emerging adults scored significantly lower than men for internal, external and total employability, an overall score which is the sum of the two previous dimensions. However, in the case of VET students, these gender differences were only significant for external employability, with a low effect size: Female VET students scored lower on external SPE. The data did not show gender differences in precarious employment, nor interaction effects between precarious employment and gender to explain SPE gender differences. These results are consistent with those obtained in studies such as Quenani et al., (2014) or Pitan and Muller (2020), which use as explanations that female students could be more conscious of the realities of gender discrimination in the labour market or/and be influenced by gender stereotypes. However, the results do not match the Spanish context. National employment reports (SEPE, 2021) showed that over the past decade, women with higher education levels are more likely to be employed than men.

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