Original title: The Changing Gender Training Gap - A Systematic Review of Evidence from Germany
Marco Seegers · September 2026
Past studies gave mixed answers about whether men or women in Germany get more job training outside of regular school. This made it hard to tell if the training gap was closing or if studies simply measured things differently. Researchers tackled this by collecting and reviewing decades of past data. They tracked how training participation changed across studies over time. They found that the old advantage men had in overall training has faded. Newer studies show either no clear gender difference or women taking part more. However, this closing gap was weaker when employers paid for or backed the training. Gaps also still appear during specific stages of life, showing training inequality changed rather than completely vanished.
Imagine a group of friends deciding who gets to pick the movie. For years, one friend always chose. Recently, others started choosing more often, so it seems fair. But when you look closer, the original friend still picks the blockbusters everyone watches, while the others pick smaller films. In this paper, the gender gap in job training has similarly shifted: women now participate more overall, but men still get more training that is directly supported by employers, and the pattern varies at different ages and career stages.
For decades, men participated more in job-related training in Germany. This review shows that gap has narrowed, but the pattern is more complex: women now participate more overall, yet men still receive more employer-sponsored training. Policymakers and companies cannot assume equality has been achieved—they need to look at where and when inequalities persist, especially across different life stages and types of training.
The abstract doesn't explicitly list limitations, but it implies that the findings are based on quantitative studies from Germany only, and the narrative synthesis may not capture precise effect sizes. The review also notes that conceptual and methodological differences between studies affect comparability, though they did not systematically account for the historical pattern.
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The Changing Gender Training Gap - A Systematic Review of Evidence from Germany — Marco Seegers — SocArXiv — doi:10.31235/osf.io/nhj2b_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.