Continuing education, a way to reduce wage inequalities between men and women?

Summary The purpose of this paper is to assess the wage return to participation in corporate continuing education (formal and informal), focusing the analysis on gender differences. To this end, French data from the Continuing Education 2000 survey are used, and a model of simultaneous equations is estimated in order to take into account both the phenomenon of endogenous selection of training practices and the correlated effects of unobservable individual heterogeneity between the different types of training and wages. The results show that in France the return to formal training is higher for women than for their male counterparts and that the return to informal training is equivalent for both sexes.