Parents’ perceptions of occupational fit

We study how adolescents’ beliefs about their parents’ occupational preferences shape gendered career aspirations. In a high-stakes setting - Swiss students choosing apprenticeships - we combine a parental conjoint experiment with a field experiment among students. Parents do give gendered recommendations, but students substantially overestimate fathers’ preference for boys to choose male-dominated occupations as well as mothers’ preference for girls to choose female-dominated occupations. Making the same-gender parent salient increases students’ aspirations for gender-congruent occupations, while the opposite-gender parent and both parents have no effect. These findings suggest that second-order beliefs, activated through parental salience, can reinforce occupational gender segregation.