Preface

This edited volume is the fruit of several research projects on gender segregation in vocational education, rooted in an interest in the topic that goes many years back. Christian Imdorf initiated an international comparative project in 2011, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, entitled ‘Educational systems and gendered school-to-work transitions,’ inviting Kristinn Hegna to collaborate in a comparison involving data from several countries. Liza Reisel was working on comparative research on gender segregation in education through the project ‘Educational Trajectories: Choices, Constraints and Contexts,’ funded by the Norwegian Research Council. In 2014, she hosted a session called ‘A comparative look at gender segregation in vocational education’ at the XVIII International Sociological Association annual conference in Yokohama, Japan. When an opportunity to seek funding for a joint international publication came along, we saw the possibility to gather new research in one edited volume, as a way to advance our collective knowledge.

Following the 2014 ISA conference session and a call for papers the same year, we invited all the authors of the present volume to join us in a workshop in Oslo in November 2014. During the two days of the workshop, drafts of all the present chapters were presented and both editors and authors benefited from the participants’ great comments and thoughtful discussions.

The main motivation for assembling this volume has been to bring together international comparative research on how patterns of gender segregation in vocational education look around the world and what we know about this phenomenon in different national contexts. More specifically, we wanted to identify some of the institutional variation that seems to make a difference for the extent to which vocational education is gender segregated. But we also wanted to include international contributions that focused on one or more individual level mechanisms in order to understand the phenomenon better.

We would like especially to thank the authors for sharing their work with us, and keeping with our sometimes challengingly strict timeline. We also had very good help from a large number of anonymous reviewers who contributed significantly by reading the manuscripts and providing insightful comments of great value to all of us. In addition, our excellent editorial assistant Daniel Arnesen helped organize large and small practical tasks, and the Comparative Social Research editorial board kept us in line and on schedule. Finally, we would like to thank our publishers at Emerald Insight for their contribution and helpful support along the way.

The volume has been funded by the Norwegian Research Council projects 234053 ‘Comparative Study of Gender Segregation in VET – institutional and individual perspectives’, 212293 ‘Safety-VET. Qualification and Social Inclusion in Upper Secondary Vocational Education and Training’ and 212340 ‘Educational Trajectories: Choices, Constraints and Contexts’ (FINNUT), and project 236770 ‘Gender Segregation in the Labour Market: Comparative Perspectives and Welfare State Challenges’ (VAM). Funding sources for research presented in the volume will be acknowledged in the individual chapters.

From start to finish, in all parts of the process, Christian Imdorf, Kristinn Hegna, and Liza Reisel have participated equally and worked together to complete this edited volume.