Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Applied Research in Management, Economics and Accounting, 2024
Year: 2024
DOI:
[PDF]
Gender and Labour Market Integration Programme
Guillaume M. A. Morlet, Katherine Caves
ABSTRACT:
Registered Apprenticeships represent a growing labour market integration programme in the United States. The United States’s Department of Labor implemented competency-based Registered Apprenticeship (CBRA) in 2008 to address skills mismatches and the chronic gaps traditional timebased Registered Apprenticeship (TBRA) had in serving women and minorities. This paper applies econometric strategies to investigate whether women are more likely to choose CBRA over TBRA as a labour market integration programme. We further analyse whether this effect is even stronger for women with uncertified but existing and occupational-relevant skills. Our empirical findings accompany both hypotheses. Women are significantly more likely to enrol into CBRA programmes, relative to TBRA. Furthermore, women with existing but uncertified skills are significantly more likely to enrol into CBRA, whereas women without skills or with college degrees are not significantly different from the baseline. Our findings are robust to various specifications, and we include a comprehensive set of fixed-effect vectors, addressing industrial, occupational and time-varying state specificities. We discuss the implications of our findings, highlighting how CBRA may be an approach to better serving more diverse populations in Registered Apprenticeship. We also discuss the conditions that CBRA must fulfil to be an effective and beneficial labour market integration programme for its programme graduates.
keywords: Training, gender, career choice, labour market integration, microeconometrics