Parents’ Perceptions of Occupational Fit
How do adolescents’ beliefs about their parents’ occupational preferences shape gendered career aspirations? In their new working paper, Anne Ardila Brenøe and Daphne Rutnam study how perceived parental preferences influence adolescents’ occupational aspirations.
IZA Discussion Paper No. 18431
The study combines a parental choice experiment with a randomized salience intervention among students in a consequential early-career decision setting.
The paper shows that parents give gendered recommendations. At the same time, students substantially overestimate fathers’ preferences for boys to choose male-dominated occupations and mothers’ preferences for girls to choose female-dominated occupations.
Making the same-gender parent salient increases aspirations for gender-congruent occupations, whereas highlighting the opposite-gender parent or both parents has no measurable effect.
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