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Despite higher educational investments, women fall behind men on most indicators of labour market success. This study investigates whether workplace skill investments set men and women off on different tracks in which the human capital acquired through higher education is either devalued or further developed. A survey sample of Swedish men and women who recently graduated from five educational programmes, leading to occupations with different gender composition, is analysed (N approximate to 2300). Results show that, a few years after graduation, men are more likely than women to acquire complex jobs and that this difference contributes to early career gender gaps in wages and employee bargaining power. The findings do not support the notion that child-related work interruptions provide a main mechanism for sorting women into less complex jobs.

In-house family ties at workplaces occur in most contexts, and are associated with both advantages and disadvantages. On the basis of 40 interviews with human resource managers at Swedish workplaces, the values and risks of in-house family ties and their importance within the workplace are analyzed jointly, thus allowing for a holistic perspective. The interviews reveal values and risks on a strategic level, for day-to-day operations, for the social work environment, and on the level of individuals. Crucially, even when in-house family ties are perceived as uncomplicated, there is a latent risk that problems might arise. The interpretation of the role of in-house family ties is also strongly related to whether they are paired with asymmetrical (vertical) power relations. It also depends heavily on the chosen perspective-that of the organization, the social work environment, the individual, or the broader society-and the perceived advantages tend to come with corresponding inverted disadvantages.

Regional adjustment models are applied to explore causal interaction between two types of people distinguished by educational attainment, and two types of jobs: creative class jobs and other jobs. Data used are for labour market regions in Finland, Norway and Sweden from the 2000s. Creative class jobs follow people with high educational attainment (one way causation), but creative class jobs also follow other jobs and vice versa (circular causation). The results suggest that stimulating creative class job growth could be accomplished through attracting people with higher education, but also by attracting other jobs with the added benefit that the initial stimulus would be reinforced through circular and cumulative causation between job creation in the two sectors.