This paper will rely mostly on Economics of Education’s and Human
Resources Economics’ contributes to explore and analyse longitudinal data
on a sample of Portuguese MSc. and PhD. women (and men) who graduate
in four Portuguese public universities.
In the light of the approaches and outcomes the reviewed
bibliography displays we believe it would be worthwhile trying to find
some possible answers for questions like the ones:
- How severe would remain the gender gap behind study track
selection and performance (e.g., between the Scientific-
Technological field versus the other areas) by the age of 15,
when most boys and girls must choose among further
studying subjects?
- Will this eventual gender differences still propagate
nowadays in as much as graduation areas are concerned?
- And, especially, in which concerns pos-graduation studies:
will we face similar or alternatively gender differentiated
motivations, strategies and opportunities in which concerns
undergoing MSc. and PhD? How long does it take to get a
Master / a PhD. for women and men, all other things
remaining constant?
We shall try to shed some light on these issues along this paper.
We will start in Section 2 with a general characterization of the
Portuguese situation. A brief theoretical discussion will be made in Section
3. Data description and statistical analysis make the object of Sections 4