The homogeneity assumption has been perhaps the most criticised
one, in which concerns both equality towards education and also further
labour market opportunities. Nevertheless, inequality can only be assessed
in its broader and diverse dimensions as a dynamic and time dependent
outcome, a feature which imposes the use of longitudinal or panel data able
to depict life cycle trajectories for individuals under consideration.
In the framework of some research projects developed under the
behalf of STF, we have been able to work with such kind of data and arrive
to results which suggest that in Portugal the homogeneity assumption is far
from being realistic in domains such as school failure and achievement,
labour market insertion and further mobility trajectories12. As we are here
particularly concerned with Portuguese scientists’ and researchers’ post-
graduation patterns, for whom secondary education and graduation patterns
have already been characterised from a gender perspective, we will no
longer develop this issue by now and postpone for a next Section those
specific professional occupations’ analysis.
The hypothesis under which more education would necessarily imply
more and better work opportunities and statuses has been successfully
proved along times as a general macroeconomic outcome. Another quite
different and much times opposite result arises nevertheless with the
transposition of that outcome into each individual’s life cycle, despite the
obstinacy with which the orthodox theory insists in trying to prove that
assumption.
Actually, instead of the soft, well adjusted and automatic transition
between school and work, real life insertion processes are more and more
12 Chagas Lopes (coord., 2001); Chagas Lopes (coord., 2004); Chagas Lopes, Medeiros & Pinto (2005).
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