Education and the utopia of gender equality: treacheries in the labour market

The rapid growth of women’s educational attainment is one of the most striking trends in statistics on education. After the Second World War in many industrialized countries, women’s educational attainments have been increasing and are now higher than men’s educational attainment. Nowadays women represent the majority among graduates in secondary and tertiary in most of EU countries almost. Judging by recent trends in international data, it seems likely that female dominance in educational attainment will become stronger in the decades ahead. Women extraordinary advancements in education comes out as the realization of what in the past was considered a utopia, i.e. equality of access and treatment of girls and boys in all track and field of education. I raise questions about the reasons why the utopia of equality between women and men has not yet been reached in the labour market too and on the mechanism preventing the conversion of female educational attainments in occupational and professional outcomes