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

Summary The purpose of this article is to evaluate the wage return to participation in corporate continuing education (formal and informal), focusing the analysis on gender differences. To do so, French data from the Continuing Education Survey 2000 are used. A simultaneous equations model is estimated afin order to account for both the phenomenon of endogenous selection of training practices and the correlated effects of unobservable individual heterogeneity between different types of training and wages. It emerges 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.