family and friends), followed by other (14.3%). Other methods are all smaller than PES. This suggests that the labor market is still much controlled by family and friend relationships, as it is generally the case in economies where unemployment is high and where family and religious ties are influential in people’s lives.

Job search channels differ by gender to some extent. Women tend to find employment more frequently through direct contacts with prospective employers (37.2% of the employed); and men tend to use more frequently the public employment service (5.3%), the networks of family and friends (61.1%) and others (7.7%). Overall, this suggests that men use more the informal and the more formal channels, although women tend to generate good direct contacts with their employers.

Women typically prefer formal working contracts suggesting risk aversion. This is evident from the preponderance of formal contracts and working arrangements that provide maternity leave benefits. Over 80% of employed women hold a contract, although the composition of contracts by duration is similar among employed men and women. In the overall population, however, women tend to have higher shares of employment with contracts of unlimited and limited duration.

For similar reasons, men tend to work more in jobs in which taxes are not paid or where the worker does not know whether taxes are paid. Men are also more likely to moonlight than women, though this is still not a common phenomenon in this young age group.

Men are more likely to report dissatisfaction with their jobs than women. This also likely suggests a greater motivation to work among employed women compared to their male counterparts.

More than 50% of the employed report that they participate in on-the-job training programs. This is slightly more common among women (63.1%) than men (47.7%). Most of this training is of the apprenticeship type (86%), but men are slightly more likely to be trained in new technologies than women.

Men are more likely to be union members. They are also more frequently employed in smallsized firms (between 1 and 9 employees), whereas women tend to be more frequently employed in medium-sized firms (between 10 and 19 employees). The former represent about 40% of employed men and the latter group about 30% of employed women. The share of men and women in largesized firms is more or less the same, at about 11%. Again the greater risk aversion of women explains why they tend to gather in medium-sized firms. The equal shares of men and women in large firms might depend on their tendency to apply more frequently gender neutral recruitment policies.

In the SWT database, unfortunately, there is no definition of firm’s ownership. Respondents are requested to declare their firm’s name which may help indicate whether they work in the private sector. These represent 24% of the sample. In addition to the firms’ name, respondents are requested to say whether they are: self-employed (11.9%) or “working for family income” (55.8%), which we take to mean that they are employed by a family business. The rest (8.4%) do not provide the name of their company. Surprisingly, the largest number of employed individuals in the sample “work for 9