Single‐sex schooling and labour market outcomes

(2011) - Alice Sullivan, Heather Joshi, Diana Leonard

Journal: Oxford Review of Education
Link:: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03054985.2010.545194
DOI:: 10.1080/03054985.2010.545194
Links::
Tags:: #paper #NCDS #Gender #SchoolType #LabourMarket
Cite Key:: [@Sullivan2011a]

Abstract

One quarter of the 1958 British Birth cohort attended single-sex secondary schools. This paper asks whether sex-segregated schooling had any impact on the experience of gender differences in the labour market in mid-life. We examine outcomes at age 42, allowing for socio-economic origins and abilities measured in childhood. We find no net impact of single-sex schooling on the chances of being employed in 2000, nor on the horizontal or social class segregation of mid-life occupations. But we do find a positive premium (5%) on the wages of women (but not men), of having attended a single-sex school. This was accounted for by the relatively good performance of girls-only school students in post-16 qualifications, not by the wider range of subjects studied by both girls and boys at single-sex schools. Men’s labour market attainments were more closely related to attending private schools and to parental class, suggesting that the intergenerational transmission of advantage, while not related to coeducation, is related to gender

Notes

“For boys, single-sex schooling was linked to a dislike of school” (Sullivan et al., 2012, p. 154)