Following in their Footsteps: Fathers' and Mothers' Influence on their Sons' and Daughters' Career Plans

• In Event: 589 - Regular Session. The Experience of Social Mobility

Abstract

In this paper, we examine data from the UCLA HERI Freshman Surveys spanning the period from 1981 to 2011. With roughly 200,000 annual respondents, a large data base – with roughly 6 million respondents – has accumulated, large enough to examine the connection between the students’ career plans and their parents’ occupations. This analysis examines in unprecedented detail the intergenerational connections between particular parental occupations (doctor, lawyer, engineer) rather than broad occupational strata such as professional, manager, etc.
The rich findings include the following. First, there is substantial inheritance of detailed occupations, that is, sizable relationship between parent’s employment in a specific occupation and their child’s intention to pursue the same field. Second, the particular occupations differ considerably in the size of these effects. For example, the odds of a son following his father’s career are much higher if he is a research scientist, physician or lawyer than if he is a high school teacher, engineer or business executive. Third, fathers and mothers influence their sons and daughters differently. For example, 11.1 percent of freshmen men reported plans to pursue a career in the same occupation as their father; for mothers and daughters, 3.4 percent overlap.
Fourth, in addition to social status effects, these data exhibit some evidence of gender-atypical influences, especially of fathers on sons. Specifically, when the father is employed in a sex-atypical occupation, such as elementary school teaching, the son is dramatically more likely to follow in his footsteps (odds-wise, even if the actual percentages are small).

Authors

• Jerry A. Jacobs, University of Pennsylvania

• Seher Ahmad, University of Pennsylvania