Lupi, A. (2025). Tackling the Gender Gap in VET: From Awareness to Structural Change through a UDL Framework, paper presented on 26 June 2025 during the EXCEED Talks at the EU Green Week 2025, as part of the session The Twin Transition: What New Professional Opportunities for Girls and Women in Advanced Manufacturing?
Despite decades of policy commitments and gradual progress toward gender equality, vocational education and training (VET) systems across Europe continue to reproduce deeply entrenched gender patterns. These patterns are not only numerical—in the form of overrepresentation or underrepresentation of one gender in specific tracks—but also structural, symbolic, and intersectional.
According to recent Eurostat-based data (Cedefop, 2025), male students account for approximately 93% of graduates in engineering and 87% in architecture and construction programmes at upper-secondary VET level across the EU, highlighting a profound gender imbalance in these sectors. By contrast, women represent a very high proportion in education and care-related VET fields (Cedefop, 2025 reports female participation in educational VET programmes at around 96.3%). These figures, however, only scratch the surface. The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE, 2024) warns that occupational gender segregation in VET reflects and reinforces broader inequalities in labour market participation, wage levels, and career progression.
Moreover, gender disparities in VET intersect with other axes of inequality. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, migrant families, or rural areas are more likely to be channelled into narrow, gender-typical vocational tracks with limited progression opportunities. Girls with disabilities or from ethnic minorities face compounded disadvantage due to both gendered expectations and systemic exclusion mechanisms.
The issue is further complicated by symbolic and cultural factors. Gender norms, often internalised during adolescence, shape the aspirations and self-perceptions of young learners. As Cedefop (2025) notes, guidance counselling and tracking decisions are rarely neutral: educators, parents, and institutional systems all contribute—often unintentionally—to the reproduction of gendered educational pathways.
Finally, technological change is reshaping the labour market, making it increasingly urgent to ensure that VET provides equitable access to future-oriented careers. Yet OECD (2023) data show that, despite high academic attainment among girls, they remain significantly underrepresented in digital, AI-related, and high-wage technical fields—a gap that vocational pathways could help reduce if properly reformed.
So, if your professional role places you among those with the power to shape educational or training practices—whether as a teacher, trainer, school leader, policy-maker, or practitioner in career guidance or labour market integration—you carry a shared responsibility to confront the persistence of gendered norms within VET systems.
You may ask: why should we actively challenge the traditional gendered orientation that continues to discourage or exclude girls and women from certain VET pathways? Is it merely a trend driven by political correctness? The answer is…
Take a look at the full article Tackling the Gender Gap in VET
