School to work or school to home? An analysis of women's vocational education in Turkey as a path to employment

This paper focuses on women's vocational education in Turkey as a gendered and gendering process. Cultural norms about women's role in society, a vocational curriculum that echoes these norms, and a labour market with gender inequalities constitute the background against which women formulate their vocational preferences and seek pathways into the labour market. We use the literatures on gender and vocational education, school-to-work transitions, and gender bargains to analyse data from qualitative fieldwork with students and graduates of girls’ vocational high schools. First, we scrutinize how students choose vocational tracks. Our findings point to the presence of a gendered bounded agency by students and graduates, according to which their choices echo traditional gender norms. Secondly, we discuss the transition from school to work, during which they are faced with gender prejudice in the labour market. Finally, we show how that process turns into a ‘school-to-home’ transition whereby graduates become homemakers.