How career preferences reflect gender stereotypes
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An Israeli study investigated how career-decisions depend on gender. When women and men named their aspired occupations, women preferred professions that were more “feminine” and men more “masculine” ones. Similarly, when study participants rated how important different aspects of work were to them (e.g., working indoors, working with numbers and figures) and then matched those job aspects with suitable occupations, men’s aspired occupations were still more “masculine” than women’s. However, these indirect occupational preferences expressed by ratings of work aspects were less gender-typical than the directly named aspired occupations. This suggests that gender bias in professional aspirations can be reduced when focusing on work aspects (e.g., autonomy, field of work, working outdoors) instead of job titles.
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