School-to-work transition: gender differences in the choices of the Italian secondary school graduates

Paola Muccitelli, Instituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Rottino Fabio Massimo, Instituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Azzurra Tivoli, Instituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)

This paper aims at detecting and verifying the gender effects on decisions taken by young people about life after secondary school education. Different gender behaviours of the Italian graduates are detected even when the choice about what to do after secondary school has become a fact: three years after secondary school qualification women have more brilliant academic results then their male colleagues do, in addition women accomplish their education more often then men do. On the other hand three years after graduation, permanent work force is prevalently composed by men. The data used for the multivariate analysis are drawn from sample surveys carried out by the Italian Institute of Statistics on school-to-work transition in 2004 on 2001 graduates. The methods of applied multivariate analysis proposal in this paper - Cluster analysis and Correspondence analysis - will be required on real data with the use of the SAS statistics packages.