The Importance of Classmates’ Gender Composition for Educational and Labour Market Outcomes

Male-dominated upper secondary programmes often lead to higher wages than female-dominated ones. This has created a strong interest in reducing gender segregation in educational choices. To achieve this, we need better knowledge about how students fare when they choose an education where their own gender is in the minority: do they complete their studies, what are their academic results, and how do they perform in the labour market?

The purpose of this project is to examine how the gender composition of classmates affects students’ success in upper secondary school and their later outcomes in the labour market. We analyse questions such as: when a student makes a non-traditional choice of education, does it matter whether there is at least one other classmate of the same gender? Does the share of classmates of the same gender also play a role?

The study is based on register data on applications, attendance, and graduation from upper secondary school. We also link this to information on occupation, unemployment, and earnings to shed some light on labour market outcomes.