Persistence of Gendered Political Self-Efficacy on Different Educational Tracks: Comparing Finland and the Netherlands

Long before adolescents are formally allowed to participate in politics, e.g., via voting, boys and girls already evaluate their ability to understand and participate in politics differently, creating a (persisting) gender gap in political self-efficacy. It seems that women, on average, are still socialized to believe that politics is a man’s world. While young children, both boys and girls already perceive politics as a male-dominated space; the older they grow, the more deeply they internalise gendered expectations also in the political arena. Research often focuses on schools as a place where democratic outcomes like political self-efficacy can be nurtured. We know, however, surprisingly little what happens to the gender gap in political self-efficacy in different educational tracks. In most countries, up to a certain age, students – both girls and boys – follow a common curriculum. After that, education is differentiated in the form of tracking: students are placed in different educational trajectories, corresponding with unique preparation for future education or for labour market orientation. These tracks differ both in their gender balance and in how much they emphasise civic education in their curricula. In most countries, tracking takes place around the age of 15 or 16 (e.g., Finland, France or the United Kingdom), yet some countries differentiate earlier (like Germany and Austria) around age 10, or (like the Netherlands and Belgium) around age 12. While a variety of tracks exist, their educational orientation can often be broadly distinguished between (pre)vocational and (pre)academic. In this paper we seek to explore to what extent the gender gap observed among adolescents remains after they move to different educational tracks and whether the gap differs in size between tracks which have varying emphasis on civic education and different gender balance. In order to answer these questions, we draw empirical evidence from two large panel surveys from Finland and the Netherlands. The first wave of the Finnish data was collected in 2021 among adolescents who completed their final year of comprehensive education in Finland in 2021 (n = 5,274). The second wave will be collected in spring 2023, when the respondents have moved on to secondary education to academic and vocational tracks. The Dutch panel data has been collected since 2018, on a yearly basis. Respondents were first interviewed in the starting year of secondary education, which coincides with the start of tracking in the Dutch educational system. In total, 2812 respondents participated in the first years of the panel study (2018-2021), of which 1866 respondents took part in more than one year. The comparison between the Dutch and Finnish context, with different educational systems in terms of school type differentiation, allows to explore what role tracking plays in the persistence of gendered political self-efficacy during adolescence.