The university student preferences on employment from a gender perspective

Abstract

A survey study about the preferences held by undergraduate students to decide on a job, what they think they should provide and how the company should be as well as where they wish to work in terms of the gender variable is presented. Different studies point out that people develop values, expectations and different professional skills associated with career and profession depending on the gender. The aim of this paper is to analyze the factors that lead young people to receive the job or profession and determine whether that perception is different being male or female. Through an ad hoc questionnaire with 52 Likert scale items and a sample of 1295 college students selected through a non-probability sampling accessibility. The sample belonged to 28 universities and 53 public and private Spanish schools where the students attended and was collected during the academic year 2010-11. The answers given in the questionnaire were analyzed with the U Mann-Whitney test and factorial exploratory principal components analysis with varimax rotation differentiated by gender. The results find that university students develop their work preferences based in gender stereotypes. Even small changes in trends are also seen in these preferences, such as the valuation of family conciliation before the employment decision or seeking jobs with constant challenges in the case of university female students.