What is it about?
By the end of high school, most adolescents aspired to gender-typical careers, which predicted differences in academic beliefs, course selection, and later college major choices. Changes in the gender typicality of career aspirations were closely linked to shifts in adolescents’ math and verbal skills and self-concepts. Girls with strong math skills shifted toward male-dominated careers later than boys, highlighting distinct gendered patterns in academic and occupational development.
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Why is it important?
This work explores gendered career aspirations more broadly than just examining STEM and non-STEM aspirations. Instead of just looking at average math and verbal skills in boys and girls, we identified individually different profiles of students. We show that girls aspiring to a gender-atypical career tend to have a higher self-concept of their math abilities and may tend to do so later in their schooling than boys. At the same time, Boys aspiring to gender atypical careers tend to have better verbal skills than other boys.
Perspectives
This article was important to me because it showed that each student follows a unique path as they begin to think about careers. Because we did so, we could examine what motivates students to make a choice that differs from that of their peers.
Jeffrey DeVries
University of California Irvine
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Exploring the links between gender-(a)typical career aspirations and educational choices: Heterogeneous developmental pathways., Developmental Psychology, July 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/dev0002015.
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