From School to Work: Gender Inequalities and Segregation Following an Apprenticeship in Switzerland

Vocational education and training (VET) is the most common post-compulsory educational pathway in Switzerland, followed by around two thirds of each birth cohort (Cortesi and Imdorf, 2013). Upon completion, the majority of apprentices are awarded a Federal VET Diploma (FVETD) following one of its 250 training programmes (Cortesi and Imdorf, 2013). By providing ready-to-use occupation-specific skills in a wide range of professions, VET has repeatedly been credited for fostering smooth and linear transitions into employment (Müller and Shavit, 1998; Bol, et.al , 2019 ; Kriesi and Schweri, 2019). Despite growing political concern, the Swiss VET system nonetheless remains marked by a strong horizontal gender segregation : while men more often undertake technical and manual occupations, women generally cluster in only a few apprenticeships in the health and social care sectors (Leemann and Keck, 2005; Becker and Glauser, 2015; Kriesi and Imdorf, 2019). Given the close link between VET apprenticeships and their subsequent gendered occupational prospects, this horizontal gender segregation may represent a key step in the reproduction of the social inequalities in the Swiss labor market (Kriesi and Imdorf, 2019; Grønning and Kriesi, 2022). Using sequence analysis and the administrative LABB database (FSO, 2024), this article provides a typology of trajectories of the 2012 FVETD graduate’s cohort over seven years, demonstrating the great diversity of pathways into higher education, employment, reorientation, and NEET status. We then rely on this typology to study the gender disparities in SWT pathways, highlighting that women have less perspectives for further education after VET and are more often limited to experience a fast transition to employment. In a second step, we use multilevel models to estimate how the allocation into one of the 250 specific VET training programmes is related to subsequent SWT. This analysis emphasizes that male-dominated VET programmes offer a substantial protection against more problematic SWT pathways. This methodological approach also allows studying how other key characteristics of VET programmes, such as the number of provided lessons, are related to subsequent pathways. Finally, we look at the consequences of evading the gender norms by enrolling into gender-atypical VET occupations. Our findings reveal that women graduating from male-dominated VET apprenticeships do not benefit from their protection against more problematic pathways and are instead more likely to pursue unstable or NEET trajectories.