Gender and school to work transitions research

This essay critically reflects on existing conceptualizations of gender in school‐to‐work transitions research. Gender is always included as a “control” variable in analyses of post‐school transitions, but the way in which gender is embedded in institutional structures across different national settings is rarely unpacked in a systematic way. The essay draws on recent research to outline the way in which gender differences in labor market outcomes, especially at the early stages of the career, are likely to reflect variation in the nature of education and training systems. In doing so, it argues for the need to build bridges between transitions research and other sociological accounts of education and gender and highlights methodological challenges in combining insights from detailed case‐studies of specific workplaces and from multivariate analyses of large‐scale national and cross‐national data sets.