Field of study shapes gendered job outcomes in Italy and Finland

Women who graduate from care-related fields of study face markedly smaller gender gaps in the labour market than their peers from other disciplines, with disparities in access to top professional positions effectively disappearing and pay gaps narrowing substantially, according to a new comparative study of university graduates in Italy and Finland. The research, published in the journal Higher Education, challenges the long-standing assumption that the path to gender equality runs primarily through encouraging women into male-dominated STEM subjects.

The study, conducted by Nevena Kulic of the University of Pavia, Irene Prix of the University of Turku, and Diana Roxana Galos of the University of Copenhagen, breaks with previous research by shifting attention away from women’s minority status in male-dominated fields. Instead, the authors distinguish between care and non-care fields of study, defined by two intersecting characteristics: a strong care component within the degree that prepares students for future care professions, and a strong stereotypical association with women. Care fields in their classification include psychology, social work, pedagogy, nursing and midwifery sciences, rehabilitation care, and primary education, among others. Medicine, while containing a substantial care component, was treated separately because it lacks the stereotypical association with femininity that characterizes nursing and social work.

The theoretical stakes of this reframing are considerable. Drawing on status characteristics theory, the researchers hypothesized that women may enjoy a comparative advantage in care-oriented fields because the skills these fields value, such as interpersonal care and emotional labour, are culturally coded as feminine. According to this perspective, gender functions as a diffuse status characteristic that shapes performance expectations, both in women’s own confidence and in employers’ evaluations. Where feminized abilities are the very currency of a profession, women’s lower ascribed status may be offset or even outweighed by the perception that they are better suited to the work. An opposing theoretical framework, the so-called glass escalator hypothesis, predicts precisely the opposite for certain outcomes: because men are rare in feminized fields, their minority status may make stereotypical ascriptions of competence and leadership especially salient, propelling them disproportionately into supervisory roles and higher pay.

To adjudicate between these competing expectations, the researchers harnessed two high-quality administrative datasets covering the 2010 graduate cohort and their labour market positions five years later, in 2015. The Italian data come from the AlmaLaurea system, which combines administrative records with survey data, yielding a sample of 56,820 graduates with master’s or long single-cycle degrees, of whom 37,252 were employed in 2015. The Finnish data draw on full-population administrative registers, comprising 21,024 graduates holding either polytechnic bachelor-level qualifications or university master’s degrees, with 18,495 employed at the time of observation. Both datasets contain detailed field-of-study classifications that allowed the team to identify care-oriented programmes with fine granularity, a feat rarely possible in cross-national comparative work.

The outcome measures went well beyond the usual focus on wages. The researchers modelled four distinct dependent variables: employment status five years after graduation, access to the higher service class as defined by the Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero occupational class scheme, job authority operationalized as supervisory responsibility over other employees, and net monthly earnings. For the three binary outcomes they employed logit models, while log-transformed earnings were analysed with ordinary least squares regression. In each case the models included an interaction between gender and the care versus non-care orientation of the field, alongside controls for age, marital status, number of children, region of residence, pre-university academic achievement, and, in the Finnish case, the type of higher education institution. Results were interpreted as average marginal effects, allowing direct comparison of gender gaps between the two field types.

The baseline picture confirmed persistent disadvantage for women in both countries. Italian men were eight percentage points more likely than women to be employed, with a nearly identical gap of 7.4 percentage points in Finland. Men held an eleven-percentage-point advantage in accessing higher service-class positions in Italy, which widened to 18.5 points in Finland, partly reflecting the dual structure of Finnish higher education, where polytechnic graduates fare systematically worse than university graduates. Male graduates in Italy were ten percentage points more likely to hold supervisory roles compared with a three-point advantage in Finland, and the gender pay gap stood at roughly 22 percent in Italy against 18 percent in Finland. Care fields themselves carried penalties: graduates of these programmes enjoyed better employment chances, likely reflecting chronic labour shortages in care occupations, but earned less and were less likely to reach the service class or supervisory positions.

Yet when the researchers examined the interaction between gender and field type, a striking pattern emerged that broadly supported the comparative advantage argument and contradicted the glass escalator hypothesis. In Italy, the gender gap in higher service-class access was around twelve percentage points in men’s favour in non-care fields but reversed to a small, statistically insignificant two-point female advantage in care fields, a relative difference of nearly fourteen points. In Finland the contrast was even sharper: no significant gender differences in service-class attainment appeared among care-field graduates, while the male premium in non-care fields reached twenty percentage points. Wage gaps followed the same logic. In Italy, men out-earned women by about 28 percent in non-care fields but only 18.5 percent in care fields. In Finland the corresponding figures were 22 percent versus 10.5 percent, meaning the pay disadvantage for women was nearly halved in care-oriented degrees.

Employment chances differed less between men and women in care fields in both countries, though this field-specific variation reached statistical significance only in Finland. Job authority was the exception to the pattern: gender gaps in supervisory positions were small and statistically indistinguishable between care and non-care fields in either country, offering no support for the idea that men enjoy accelerated advancement into leadership within feminized professional contexts. The authors note that in the United States, men constitute roughly ten percent of the nursing workforce but nearly half of nursing leadership, yet their findings suggest such glass escalator dynamics may be conditional rather than universal, possibly limited to specific occupations or national settings.

The cross-country comparison yielded a surprise. Given Italy’s more conservative welfare state, lower scores on the Gender Equality Index (69.2 versus Finland’s 74.5), and more traditional attitudes toward working mothers, the researchers expected uniformly larger gender gaps in Italy. Instead, gaps in employment were similar across the two countries, pay gaps were slightly lower in Finland, Italy performed worse on supervisory positions, and Finland showed more strongly gendered access to the service class. One plausible explanation lies in the strong ties between care-related qualifications and public sector employment in both countries, where bureaucratic rules may constrain discriminatory hiring and promotion. School-to-work linkages offer another clue: in Finland, where degrees map tightly onto specific occupations, care qualifications protect women, but weakly linked non-care degrees may amplify gender differences in job search outcomes.

Notably, the comparative patterns were broadly consistent across the two national contexts, suggesting that the care-versus-non-care divide matters in similar ways regardless of welfare regime. Even so, the study found no field in which women held a clear advantage over men. Even in care-oriented disciplines, men retained at least a small edge across nearly all outcomes, differing from audit studies of hiring that sometimes show female advantages in callback rates, likely because those experiments capture initial employer responses rather than realized career trajectories. Additional analyses showed that the largest male premiums clustered in technical fields such as engineering, architecture, and information technology, while medicine and dentistry, the non-care fields closest in content to care work, most resembled care fields in their smaller gender gaps.

The findings carry practical weight for policy. Because care fields reduce but do not eliminate gender inequality, and because their lower average financial returns continue to fall disproportionately on women given the fields’ heavy feminization, the authors argue that policymakers should pursue both desegregation of fields of study and improved pay and career prospects within care professions, echoing ongoing European Union initiatives. Employers, they suggest, should ensure transparent recruitment, pay, and promotion procedures so that small gender advantages do not compound over careers. The study also points toward future research replicating the analysis in countries with higher and lower levels of gender equality, and toward refining theories of the glass escalator, which the authors argue should be understood as a conditional mechanism operating only in some settings rather than a universal feature of feminized work. Care work, long dismissed as devalued women’s territory, may paradoxically offer women graduates their fairest starting point in the labour market.