Refugee Women’s Transition to VET in Germany: Examining the Role of Gender Norms and Human Capital Endowments

Between 2015 and 2020, over 600,000 women applied for asylum in Germany (Eurostat, 2023). Since formal qualification and labor market outcomes are strongly coupled in the host country, the completion of vocational education and training (VET) can be considered an important foundation for the socio-economic integration of the predominantly young refugee women (Cardozo, 2023). So far, however, refugee women have only participated in VET to a very small extent (Niehues, 2021), which limits them to rather unfavorable segments of the highly segregated German labor market. For women’s vocational trajectories in particular, traditional gender roles that assign women to the domestic sphere as well as the varying accessibility to education and employment systems depending on the country have proven to be of great influence (e.g. Nussbaum, 2004). The article therefore examines the extent to which various contextual conditions related to gender norms as well as human capital endowments acquired in the country of origin are associated with refugee women’s transition chances to VET in Germany.

For this purpose, the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees is analyzed using a piecewise-constant exponential model for the time period 2016–2021. The sample comprises refugee women who are of the appropriate age to enter VET, i.e. between the ages of 18 and 30, and arrived in Germany after 2013 (N=945).

The descriptive results reveal that only 9% of the women in the sample transitioned to VET during the observation period. The multivariate analyses indicate that neither their human capital endowments acquired in the country of origin (i.e. level of education and work experience), nor their own gender role attitudes, nor having children nor the frequency of contact to persons from the same country of origin are significantly associated with their transition chances to VET; only having a partner shows a particularly strong negative association in this regard.