Educational and Professional Ambitions of French Girls

Educational and professional ambitions of French girls.

With the European research project GOETE (Governance of educational trajectories in Europe), we are able to deepen the educational and vocational guidance by taking the teenagers’ point of view.

To explain and understand the construction of educational trajectories, GOETE associates a double quantitative and qualitative approach in 8 European countries. Data was collected by questionnaire aimed at teenagers in the last year of lower secondary school and from questionnaires aimed at their parents, and also by interviews with teenagers, parents, and professionals (teachers, guidance counselors, supervisors, social workers, nurses, youth workers).

The first statistical results reveal that on average the girls’ vision for their future includes a longer educational trajectory than the boys’, with sometimes large gaps in their favor as in Slovenia for example. Contrary to this, in France, despite better success in schooling, young women remain less ambitious than young men.

Following a general panorama of the perspectives of these young European people, we will focus on French youth to understand this phenomena. We will expose the objective and subjective barriers : how the French teenage girls cope with divergent advices from guidance counselors, teachers, parents and why they limit their educational trajectories - often marked by their gender and their social background.