Abstract:

Introduction:
For the last few years, universities had incorporated several consultation procedurals for every groups of interest involved in the education process, to evaluate and improve the quality of higher education. Recently, studies involving graduates have become more important, as a useful tool to orient and adjust the formative process to the labour market. However, there are not many gender-sensitive studies about the graduates’ labour integration. In that way, gender-sensitive research helps to create better social and working conditions which allow an optimal professional development for women and men. With that aim, the Tutoring Plan of the “Máster Oficial en Psicología del Trabajo y las Organizaciones, Jurídico-Forense y de Intervención Social” from the University of Santiago (Spain), have analysed, among other actions, the labour integration process of its graduates with a gender-sensitive perspective. To do that, perceived labour equality conditions, family (caring of children and dependent persons) and domestic burdens (domestic work), as well as job quality (salary, working hours and job stability), were evaluated by gender.

Method:
An ad hoc questionnaire was created to evaluate different variables; here, the ones related to first job quality, current job quality and perceived labour inclusion barriers were included. With the participants’ responses (n=99, M=27.29 years and 80.8% women), a database was created, and descriptive results were presented.

Results:
Results show that, although most of the participants don’t perceive family burdens, if we analyse the results by gender, women perceive these barriers most. Attending to domestic burdens, they have a major relevance for participants than family ones, and again, gender analysis shows that 80% of these responses are given by women. Regarding to equality perception, the great majority of participants allege that women have more troubles in getting a job than men and it is more perceived by women. Regarding to job quality we found a tendency in both first and current job: it belongs to the public sector, they’re employees, have a half-day job (for the first job) or a full-time job (for the current job) and a salary around 1000€. Additionally, when the existence of possible gender-based differences is analysed, it is observed that there is a salary gap: results about current job show that although the sample is mainly formed by women, the highest average salaries are informed by men. In that way, it is also observed that more men are receiving the average salary, while 21% of women are perceiving less than 500€ per month and no men are included in this category.

Conclusions:
With all the possible limitations of the study in mind, the results obtained reveal a reality in which family and domestic burdens are still perceived to a greater extent by women, leading them to a major exposition to personal and family stress. In addition to that, employment quality analysis shows that more precarity exists among women, with more possibilities of getting lower salaries than men for the same work. Finally, it is worthwhile to highlight the importance of including a gender perspective on this kind of studies, not only to evaluate the academic interest and the grade’s update, but as a way of giving visibility to socioeconomic necessities and, among them, especially, the gender (in)equality.

Keywords:

Gender, labour integration, graduate’s evaluation, cultural barriers, psychology.