Most Portuguese post-graduation students depend on a fellowship or
a place in the labour market because both direct and opportunity costs are
high and increase with age. The Portuguese Science and Technology
Foundation’s (STF) fellowship database is statistically meaningful and
sheds light into some relevant features: between 1999 and 2002 the STF
fellowship feminisation rate raised from 41,5% to 49,8%. But when we
restrain data to consider only PhD’s taken abroad we can see that the share
of women diminishes drastically to some 38,9%. The same database also
reveals that an important percentage of the fellowship-holders do not
conclude PhD. before the fellowship time elapse: among these ones, we
find some 46% and 42% among female and male candidates, respectively.
These indicators are particularly meaningful of some of the existing
differences in studying opportunities and restrictions between women
and men applying to post-graduation studies, a feature we are
particularly concerned with.
Therefore, it is important to consider now the information on the
articulations existing between work and further schooling trajectories. We
have observed previously the important and raising share of Portuguese
women in most of the graduation scientific fields: should there be a
corresponding participation rate of these scientist women in the alike
labour market occupations? And, if so, will this correspondence be in line
with the post-graduation strategies they decide to take in a later stage? Will
we find behind those further studying trajectories identical or alternatively
quite different determinants when confronting women’ and men’ life
patterns?
Women graduate and post-graduate in S&T mostly develop their
occupational activity in three different work fields: Higher Education (HE),