The study illustrates the advantages and challenges to using administrative data that were collected for use in program information or performance assessment by illustrating how information can be used in academic research. Although results of the study provide insights into potential gender differences in using WIA services via the Adult program, it also highlights limitations to using the data as a critical piece of information—occupation at program entrance—is not available.

The study uses publicly available, but little used, Workforce Investment Act Standardized Records Data (WIASRD)—that has been linked to five-year information from the American Community Survey (ACS) and a staged multivariate analysis to examine the extent to which pre-program individual and local area characteristics might explain the gender differences in the WIA services received by customers who left the WIA program in 2009 and the extent to which the characteristics and WIA services received might explain employment and earnings differences after leaving the program. We show that a greater percentage of women than men entered the WIA program with at least one employment barrier (60 vs. 50 percent). Further, women were more likely than men to receive WIA services in local labor markets that might be characterized as disadvantaged. The differences in individual and local area characteristics explain about 90 percent of the 8.3 percentage point advantage females have in receiving training services and about 70 percent of their 5.9 percentage point advantage in receiving supportive services. They do not, however, explain the large gender difference in the focus of occupational training and, in conjunction with WIA services received, explain only about 60 percent of the earnings gap in the first year after leaving the WIA program.