Abstract:

In this work we analyze differences between woman and man on the intention to start a business while they are studying at university. We distinguish three different employability itineraries that are typically present in the labour market: (a) Self-employment, (b) Employee in the private sector, and (c) Employee in the public sector (civil servants). We also set apart ten different types of university studies which correspond to the casuistry of this case study: the University of Alicante.
The objective is to study whether the intention expressed by students to be inserted in each one of the three different labour itineraries shows typical differences between sexes or, on the contrary, there are no differences or they are arbitrary.
In addition we will also test if differences are consistent between different groups of degrees. In this way we will test if the intentions on self-employment and paid employment are a characteristic for gender or they are due to the typical patterns of the groups of university education or a combination of both factors.
Entrepreneurship has been widely studied considering many factors that influence it: entrepreneurial climate, occurrence of business failure, causes of business failure, etc. The revision of the literature has shown that those factors can be gathering into two different groups: personality traits and environmental.
We will focus attention on the environmental factors that are related to the labour market segmentation, like wage, atypical work, internal and external labour markets.

Keywords:

Labour itineraries, self-employment, entrepreneurship, university students, gender approach.