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Higher paid jobs for women begins in primary school


Career advice for girls and women is failing them, announced British Members of Parliament (The Times, June 20, 2013). So is vocational training.
In Britain, the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee (BISC), with Labour MP Adrian Bailey as chairperson, maintain that career advice is not providing women with a range of choices, but instead, the advice continues to promulgate information that does not break down persistent work segregration or traditional roles – roles that inevitably only lead to the lower paid jobs. Consequently young girls overwhelmingly tend toward careers in social care and beauty. Bailey said that the government was committed to improving the representation of women in company boardrooms, but little had been done to tackle the low representation of women in industry and science.


The BISC report said that the five most popular career choices for women aged 22-29 years were in retail, care work, teaching, customer service, and child care. Men aged 22-29 years had different top five most popular job choices: construction, retail, customer service, IT and electronics.


BISC is calling for a “cultural change” to raise the aspirations of young girls. Two entry points identified for this cultural change are: (1) when girls are 14 years old when they choose their General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) subjects; and (2) at 16 years of age when girls select vocational training courses or A levels.
Only 20% of girls chose physics in secondary school A levels. However, those that undertook the subject gained higher grades than their male students. Yet career advice and other information often continues to send the message that boys achieve better results in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics  (STEM) subjects. BISC adviced that career advisors, teachers, and all people involved in education and upbringing should review the way they discuss employment and career roles to children, particularly girls.
BISC also criticized vocational training, saying that it did little to encourage non-traditional or higher-paid careers for women or to encourage girls to enter apprenticeships in industry and science (including construction, electronics or technology). Girls continued to choose apprenticeships and course in the lowest-paid sectors, such as child care, hairdressing and beauty.
United Kingdom statistics show that only 1,200 girls (10%) were enrolled in IT programs in 2012, compared with 10,400 boys. Only 400 girls (3%) were enrolled in engineering in 2012, compared with 12,880 boys. Some would say that it is due to girls not enrolling in training, but this is not the case, because 58,600 girls were enrolled in health and social work courses in 2012.
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