Journal for Educators, Teachers and Trainers

Abstract

Women are still not being offered equal opportunities in the workplace, be-cause apart from being workers, they are also caregivers, i.e. they do double shifts. One way to enhance women�"s job opportunities is through their professional development. Training is one of the best strategies for professional development. Nonetheless, in Spain, there is a series of factors which hinder female workers�" access to training. In fact, scientific literature do not usually compares these factors from a gender perspective; therefore, the aim of this paper is to describe differences between male and female participation levels in training over the last five years, and analyse the factors that affect women�"s participation. The methodology consisted of a mixed non-simultaneous approach: the analysis of three Spanish and Catalan sources of official data (n = 10,879), and interviews with 5 experts in gender policies and 6 trainer managers from 6 companies. The integrated results yield different types of difficulties to access training based on gender and a necessity to relate training policies to gender policies. Because of these differences, it is possible to establish a list of features related to women who participate in training, which allow both academics and practitioners to intervene to promote women�"s training participation and therefore, their professional development.