Developmental Roots and Predictors of Career Aspirations and Disparities

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Children’s career aspirations have the potential to pave lifelong career trajectories. Existing research focuses on children’s aspirations toward specific careers; however, little is known about the broader mechanisms that inform children’s professional pursuits. This symposium utilizes quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate children’s reasoning about the professional world. Four talks center on how values and identities (e.g., gender, SES, race) inform children’s envisioning of their professional futures.

The first talk investigates American children’s reasoning about a professional hierarchy, finding that with age, children increasingly associate greater wealth, competence, and happiness with higher-level careers on the hierarchy, and that older boys (vs. older girls) and children from higher (vs. lower) SES are more likely to aspire toward higher-level careers. The second talk finds that Canadian boys’ (vs. girls’) lower communal and higher agentic values predict their career- versus family-orientation. Moreover, boys’ lower communal goals are predicted by an association between communion and girls. The third talk demonstrates that Singaporean children associate brilliance with men (vs. women), and that the extent to which young girls associate men with brilliance predicts whether they aspire to careers perceived as requiring this quality. The fourth talk pushes back on a perspective focused only on the setbacks experienced by underrepresented groups, and spotlights how African American girls envision their intersectional identities and humanity within STEM careers.

These talks showcase novel approaches to studying the emergence of children’s abstract reasoning about careers, and illustrate the importance of considering the developmental roots and predictors of occupational disparities.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Reut Shachnai, Yale University

• Isobel A Heck, University of Chicago

Individual Presentations

• Children’s Reasoning about Future Careers: Hierarchies, Gender, and SES - Presenting Author: Reut Shachnai, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Isobel A Heck, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Rachel Ann King, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Katherine D. Kinzler, University of Chicago

• The Role of Communal Values in Children’s Gender Stereotypical Role Preferences - Presenting Author: Katharina Block, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Antonya Gonzalez, Western Washington University; Non-Presenting Author: Toni Schmader, University of British Columbia; Non-Presenting Author: Andrei Cimpian, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Andrew Scott Baron, University of British Columbia (UBC)

• The Association Between Elementary School Children’s Gender-Brilliance Stereotypes and Career Aspirations - Presenting Author: Siqi Zhao, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Peipei Setoh, Nanyang Technological University; Non-Presenting Author: Daniel Storage, University of Denver; Non-Presenting Author: Andrei Cimpian, New York University

• Young African American Girls’ Drawings as Representations of STEM Career Aspirations - Presenting Author: Jennifer Turner, University of Maryland - College Park