Probing the substructures of gender inequality in Malta : an empirical study of institutional affiliation and sex segregation in Maltese further and higher education

Abstract

In spite of recent progress in the area, Malta scored just below the EU-27 average in a recent European report on gender inequality. Among the key issues flagged, were uneven concentrations of women and men in education, as well as gaps in employment and unadjusted pay. This paper explores some of the prospective underlying mechanisms continuing to drive such forms of inequity in Malta, with a special focus on sex-segregation in further and higher education. An empirical, quantitative research methodology based on various forms of contingency table analysis was selected, combined with a Popperian post-positivist approach to null hypothesis-testing. Binary logistic and log-linear modelling techniques were applied to secondary public data from the Maltese National Statistics Office, on the distributions of student and worker populations by sex and field from the 2016/17 academic year. The findings showed that Maltese women in the academic track were more than twice as likely to challenge gender stereotypes by taking up traditionally masculine-labelled courses than their peers in the vocational tracks. Women in the academic track were also less likely to end up in feminine-labelled roles in the workplace. The Maltese further and higher education system was nonetheless heavily sex-segregated overall when compared to the workplace, with Maltese women three times as likely to find themselves in feminine-labelled fields at college or university, than they were at work. Declining occupational sex-segregation was interpreted within the context of ever-increasing competition for available work, and thereby construed as a symptom of the devaluation of labour power inherent in capital-labour relations. In an increasingly neoliberalist and gender-essentialist ideological climate, the paper goes on to argue that such a devaluation places women, specifically, at heightening risk of intensifying capitalist exploitation, engendering a heightened impetus towards emancipatory curricular reform, and authentic system-wide deconstruction of enduring gender stereotypes in Maltese further and higher education.