This paper focuses on the development of group typicality in children’s occupational aspirations (OAs). Children tend to aspire to occupations perceived as typical of their gender, ethnic and socioeconomic status (SES) groups. In the UK, evidence suggests that children aspire to jobs largely performed by same-gender workers. Low SES children are less likely to aspire to high-paying or prestigious jobs than high SES counterparts (Moulton et al., 2018). Some ethnic minority children aspire to occupations that are prestigious but perceived as ‘safe’ by ethnic minority members (Archer, Dewitt & Wong, 2014).  

Although this paper focuses on the  UK context, group-typical OAs are evidenced across European countries. Large-scale cross-cultural studies have been conducted to compare children’s (Chamber et al., 2018) and adolescents’ gender-typical aspirations (Leuze & Helbig, 2015) across EU countries. Class typicality has been studied in Germany (Miyamoto & Witch, 2020), France (Guyon & Huillery, 2016), and Spain (Haller & Portes, 2019). Ethnic typicality has been highlighted in immigrant-receiving EU countries such as Germany (Beicht & Walden, 2017), Sweden (Asian et al., 2019), and Greece (Katarzi, 2018).  

Understanding these types of group-typicality in OAs is an important focus of academics, policymakers, and educators across Europe because children may unnecessarily limit their occupational choices based on their group membership early in life, which can potentially perpetuate structural inequalities.  

To date, research examining children’s OAs has primarily focused on the effect of single group membership in group typical OAs (e.g. girls). However, it has been found that patterns of group typical OAs can vary depending on belonging to an intersectional sub-group (e.g. high SES girls). This is evidenced in that gender-typical aspirations can be more apparent among low SES girls relative to high SES girls (Polavieja & Platt, 2014). Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to the role of intersectional group membership (e.g. low SES girls) in developing group-typical OAs. 

The paper is derived from ongoing doctoral research of the first author which aims to longitudinally examine the development of group-typical OAs in middle childhood and early adolescence. The present paper extends the literature by answering the following question:  

To what extent does holding single and intersectional group memberships based on gender, ethnicity and SES categories affect the development of each gender, ethnic and class typical OAs?   

This paper draws on multiple theories to form the conceptual basis for this paper’s hypothesised relations among constructs. Life-span developmental-contextual approach (Vondracek, Lerner, & Schulenberg, 2019) was used to understand children’s OAs as one of the antecedents of later career development. This early development of OAs occurs in multiple layers of social contexts. Gottfredson (1981)’s theory assists in understanding why and how children develop group-typical OAs. It is thought that children circumscribe occupations by matching their views on social self (e.g. gender, ethnic and class identities) with stereotypical images of occupations. Children begin to use their understanding of gender to form their initial occupational preferences. As children develop an understanding of more abstract social groups (i.e. SES and ethnicity) by entering adolescence, increasing knowledge of classed and ethnicised workforce affects them to further narrow down occupations that are less ‘appropriate’ for their group (Gottfredson, 1981). From a social reproduction perspective (Bourdieu, 1984), this group patterned aspiration formation process is understood as (re-)production of ‘habitus’; adolescents become internalising the idea of ‘what people like us to do’, which is shaped by structural privileged and disadvantaged opportunities and resources possessed by groups (Scandone, 2018).  

A longitudinal secondary analysis was conducted using data from a UK’s Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). The MCS follows the lives of children born in 2000/2001 and over-samples ethnic minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged households to achieve a nationally representative sample. This paper is based on data collected when MCS children were at age 7, 11 and 14 (Initial sample size=13,000). To examine group-typical OAs, children’s OAs data measured at those age points were re-constructed using UK’s Annual Population Survey data. For gender and ethnic typicality, children's aspired occupations were mapped onto their actual percentages of women and ethnic minority adult jobholders. Median hourly pay of aspired occupations was used to examine class typicality of OAs. An inter-categorical approach (McCall, 2005) was employed as an analytic tool to apply intersectionality in this research. In so doing, it was designed not only to examine the development of each group typicality dimension but also subgroup variations in this group typicality development. Three different sets of multilevel models were built in R using the lme4 package to separately examine the development of gender, ethnic and class typicality in OAs. Each set was designed to simultaneously examine main between-group effects (e.g. boys vs. girls) as well as within-group effects (e.g. low SES girls vs. High SES girls) in the trajectories of group-typical OAs.

Findings demonstrate complex and significant variations in the development of group-typical OAs. For instance, in the case of the gender typicality component, significant between-group effects were found; girls and boys on average consistently aspire to jobs predominantly performed by the same gender jobholders from age 7 to 14. Complex variations emerged when examining within-group effects. High SES girls tend to develop less female-typical OAs than low SES girls over time, whereas high SES boys tend to develop more male-typical OAs over time. Results from ethnic and class typicality dimensions also indicate complex between and within-group variations in the development of respective ethnic and class-typical OAs. Overall, the intersectional approach suggests the importance of the complex relations between ethnicity, gender and SES in the development of group-typical aspirations, which can be overlooked when a researcher only focuses on the role of a single social category.

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