From Higher Education Studies to Self-Employment - a matter of discipline and gender?

• The EU agenda strongly promotes entrepreneurship (Papatsiba, 2009). The responsibly for earning a livelihood has increasingly become individualised, and self-employment is strongly emphasised. Creating new businesses and services is seen as a way of keeping the unemployment levels low and thus an intact or even improved living standard in the European countries. There is a special confidence in that the university graduated should be in the frontline in creating these new employment possibilities and entrepreneurship education programmes is perceived as an effective tool to stimulate students in this direction. On the contrary, universities have since long educated students for positions in the service of the State. Moreover, a built out welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1990), that assure a certain living standard for its population also in the case of unemployment at ill-health will further decrease the incentives for becoming self-employed (GEM, 2011). Our results show that the rhetoric about increasing need for entrepreneurs and for new businesses is not a neutral urge, the circumstances for men and women to become entrepreneurs are so different because of their different fields of knowledge. Moreover, higher education students are less incentive to become self-employed because of their, since long directed purpose, to become civil servants.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Pedagogik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Pedagogy (hsv//eng)

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