Factors affecting Spanish and Catalan women participation in training

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.