Career barriers encountered by students in a female secondary schools

Abstract

In this study I am going to look into the career barriers that female students encounter. I think that this is a current topic because of the situation that we are living in today, where more women are contributing in the work force. Amongst all 25 EU member states, Malta has the lowest female employment rate of 33.7% in comparison to the 56.3% of the EU. Due to the low employment rate for women, Malta has the largest employment gender gap in Europe of 40.1% when compared to the EU average of 15%. There may be a variety of reasons why this is so and many of them are in my opinion social influences which affect women in a negative way. In the literature review, I will discuss previous studies and reports on this topic, outlining what carrier barriers are and the intrinsic and extrinsic barriers that a female student may face in her life. 1.2 Introduction It has traditionally been difficult for women to contribute in the world of work, as equal partners with men. This is a story of all the women in the world, but I am going to focus mainly on the situation present in Malta. Even though half of the Maltese population is made up of women and although it is very clear that things have very much improved over the past few years, still we cannot assert that there are equal opportunities between the two sexes. The aim of this study is to identify the difficulties that girls face with regards to carrier choice. For this purpose a quantitative method of data gathering was used. A questionnaire was designed and distributed amongst all the form 3 and form 4 students of St Monica School Birkirkara. The age range of these students varies from 13 to 15 years. The study was carried out entirely at St Monica because since I am a teacher there, I am very much interested to see what our students want to do in the future and the barriers that may hold them back them from doing their dream job. Although I would have preferred to include the form 5 students in this study, as they are the ones who are at the completion of their compulsory education, I was not able to do so due to the fact that they have a lot of work as they have to sit for their Matsec examinations. Through the questionnaire, the students were asked simple questions about themselves and their choice of career so that I could investigate the career aspirations of our girls and find out what career barriers these students have or will likely to have in the future. I also looked at their parents' educational background and the job that they would like to do when these girls grow up. Through this study, I want to discover if there is a relationship between the family background of the students and their career aspirations, whether the students are aware of the requirements they need in order to do their preferred job, what their parents think of this job, whether they are w1llmg to go and work abroad and what are the problems that they assume may hold them back from doing their dream job. This study could help me to get an indication of whether these students are happy with their choice of option that they did when they were in form 2, and if not why would they have chosen differently. Through this study I also want to investigate the amount of help students' access when they are deciding on the option scheme to follow and see the perception that the students have of themselves, to find out whether personal characteristics are related to career barriers. I also what to know if the girls would be willing to do jobs that are considered as masculine jobs. I believe that this study will help me and my school to pinpoint barriers that may be preventing the students from doing what they would like to do, so that we will try to reduce, or eliminate these career barriers. Also, discovering the nature of the students' barriers will throw more light on our students' present needs when coming to take decisions about future careers.