In times of a highly diversified labor market with occupational opportunities hard to grasp entirely, students’ ways of navigating the manifold information about possible careers are more important than ever in setting the path for their future lives. Methods and patterns of seeking information about possible careers evolve rapidly as students, headhunters, and human resource departments utilize a plethora of social media and online platforms to explore career options, advertise jobs, and approach possible employees and employers alike. However, not all students are equally well equipped and prepared for today’s vast and almost inextricable market of career opportunities.

Inequalities along the lines of gender, socioeconomic, and immigrant status may affect how students seek information about careers, develop an interest in various educational and occupational opportunities, and perceive their chances of success (Fernández et al., 2023; Plenty & Jonsson, 2021). For example, female students tend to base their choice of study program on their preference for a specific reasoning style and expected work tasks (Combet, 2024). Beyond these individual sociodemographic characteristics, examining inequalities in career aspiration requires attention to controlling for students’ sense of belonging within schools, their perceived quality of student-teacher relationship and their highest expected education level from themselves because the greater these factors are for a student, the greater their career aspirations tend to be (Batool & Ghayas, 2020; Gamboa et al., 2023; Khattab, 2015; Korpershoek et al., 2020), increasing their probability in engaging in more future career information seeking practices (FCISP).

Additionally, research points to how contextual factors such as schools and the family also influence students’ career-seeking behaviors (Carrico et al., 2019). However, little is known about compositional effects on students’ career-related practices. Research has shown that compositional characteristics of school, such as gender composition, are highly salient contextual factors that affect various socioemotional and academic outcomes (Bécares & Priest, 2015), including career aspirations. For example, the gender composition of a school can influence students’ future career information seeking practices, as scholars underline that students’ career aspirations are gender-typed, with female students exhibiting more flexibility in their career aspirations than their counterparts (Fabes et al., 2014). Further on contextual impacts, differences in school type (mostly indicating differential level of available resources in a school) and parental support might act as other mechanisms behind differential engagement in FCISP of adolescents (Batool & Ghayas, 2020).

This study aims to explore variations in students’ future career information-seeking practices (FCISP) with regards to student SES, gender, and immigrant status and some contextual factors of school across a wide range of student populations. Understanding the interplay of personal, social, and environmental effects on students’ career information-seeking practices is crucial as career aspirations significantly influence future employment outcomes, life satisfaction, and overall well-being (Dudovitz et al., 2017; Johnson et al., 2014). Moreover, the type of career that students seek shapes not only their pathways into society but also their trajectories through educational and labor markets. The Life-Span Life-Space Theory (Super, 1980) suggests that career aspirations begin forming early in life through complex interactions between personal attributes, social influences, and environmental factors. These theoretical frameworks emphasize that career development is particularly crucial during the exploration period, typically occurring between ages 15 and 24, when individuals actively engage in career-related information-seeking behaviors. The exploration period represents the formative years in adolescence that shape persisting inequalities over the life course, e.g., gender inequality becomes more pronounced during the teenage years when young women navigate gendered disparities in various life domains (Beban et al., 2024). Our analysis focuses on this crucial period in young people’s lives.

Using a multilevel modelling approach, this study aims to explore effects of the axes of inequality and school-level factors on students’ differential future career information-seeking practices (FCISP), while controlling for other individual variables. On the individual level, the analysis focuses on specific axes of inequality such as gender, migration status, and economic-social-cultural status (ESCS) from PISA 2022 dataset (OECD, 2024), while controlling for students’ curiosity, sense of school belonging, perceived quality of student-teacher relations and highest expected education level from themselves. On the school level, it focuses on contribution of contextual factors, including school type, student gender composition, and school encouragement on parental involvement, to differential students’ engagement in FCISP. The research aims to answer two key questions: 1. What are the inequality profiles of students concerning FCISP based on gender, ESCS, and migration status? 2. How do school-level contextual variables impact students' FCISP engagement? This study focuses on students in general education programs, excluding vocational tracks, as vocational students have already made career decisions, making them less relevant to the study's focus on early career aspirations and exploration. Therefore, the analyzed nested dataset from PISA 2022 (OECD, 2024) includes responses from 187,750 students in 10,184 schools across 50 countries, providing a rich cross-national dataset to explore patterns of differential FCISP across diverse educational systems. Accounting for the nested structure, the multilevel model is run with maximum likelihood and available case approach. Model fit is assessed using Akaike and Bayesian Information Criteria (AIC and BIC) for model comparison and Intraclass Correlations (ICCs) to represent proportional variance attributable to group levels. The ICCs show that, throughout the models, the variance attributable to differences between schools and countries remained relatively stable, ranging from 7.57% to 8.02%, and from 4.76% to 5.26%, respectively.

The first research question focuses on the impact of gender, economic-social-cultural status (ESCS), and migration status on students’ engagement in FCISP. The results indicate significant effects of student gender and SES, even after controlling for factors such as curiosity, sense of school belonging, perceived quality of student-teacher relationships, and highest expected education level. The findings show that male students, across 50 countries, tend to engage significantly less in FCISP compared to females, suggesting a disadvantage for males (p<.05). In terms of ESCS, students from more affluent backgrounds engage significantly more in FCISP than those from lower ESCS backgrounds (p<.01), highlighting an advantage for students from wealthier families. Regarding immigration background, no significant findings were found. The second research question examines the relationship between school contextual variables and students’ engagement in FCISP. The results show that, across 50 countries, students attending public schools engage significantly more in FCISP than those attending both private independent schools (p<.01) and private government-dependent schools (p<.05). Additionally, students attending to schools with greater school encouragement of parental involvement tend to show significantly higher engagement in FCISP compared to their counterparts (p<.01). While a significant disadvantage for male students is found, a higher male-to-female student ratio at the school level is, contrastingly, associated with significantly greater FCISP engagement (p<.01), suggesting that school gender composition, independent of individual gender, impacts students’ differential FCISP. This contrasting finding prompted the need to further explore the cross-level interaction effect between student gender and school gender composition, revealing that student gender and the school gender composition jointly influence FCISP engagement. Male and female students respond differently to the school gender composition in terms of their engagement in FCISP, with males benefiting significantly more from higher male-to-female-ratio schools and females showing a relatively slight change regarding the school gender composition.

Batool, S. S., & Ghayas, S. (2020). Process of career identity formation among adolescents: Components and factors. Heliyon, 6(9). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04905 Beban, A., Walters, V., Ashley, N., & Cain, T. (2024). Older women’s constructions of equality over the lifecourse. Ageing and Society,1–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400045X Bécares, L., & Priest, N. (2015). Understanding the Influence of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Class on Inequalities in Academic and Non-Academic Outcomes among Eighth-Grade Students: Findings from an Intersectionality Approach. PLOS ONE, 10(10), e0141363. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141363 Carrico, C., Matusovich, H. M., & Paretti, M. C. (2019). A Qualitative Analysis of Career Choice Pathways of College-Oriented Rural Central Appalachian High School Students. Journal of Career Development, 46(2),94–111. https://doi.org/10.1177/0894845317725603 Combet, B. (2024). Women’s aversion to majors that (seemingly) require systemizing skills causes gendered field of study choice. European Sociological Review, 40(2),242–257. https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcad021 Dudovitz, R. N., Chung, P. J., Nelson, B. B., & Wong, M. D. (2017). What Do You Want to Be When You Grow up? Career Aspirations as a Marker for Adolescent Well-being. Academic Pediatrics, 17(2),153–160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acap.2016.08.006 Fabes, R. A., Hayford, S., Pahlke, E., Santos, C., Zosuls, K., Martin, C. L., & Hanish, L. D. (2014). Peer influences on gender differences in educational aspiration and attainment. In I. Schoon & J. S. Eccles (Eds.), Gender differences in aspirations and attainment: A life course perspective (pp.29–52). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139128933.004 Fernández, D. P., Ryan, M. K., & Begeny, C. T. (2023). Gender expectations, socioeconomic inequalities and definitions of career success: A qualitative study with university students. PLOS ONE, 18(2), e0281967. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0281967 Gamboa, V., Rodrigues, S., Bértolo, F., Marcelo, B., & Paixão, O. (2023). Curiosity saved the cat: Socio-emotional skills mediate the relationship between parental support and career exploration. Frontiers in Psychology, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1195534 Khattab, N. (2015). Students’ aspirations, expectations and school achievement: What really matters? British Educational Research Journal, 41(5),731–748. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3171 Korpershoek, H., Canrinus, E. T., Fokkens-Bruinsma, M., & de Boer, H. (2020). The relationships between school belonging and students’ motivational, social-emotional, behavioural, and academic outcomes in secondary education: A meta-analytic review. Research Papers in Education, 35(6),641–680. https://doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2019.1615116 OECD. (2024). PISA 2022 Technical Report. OECD. https://doi.org/10.1787/01820d6d-en Plenty, S. M., & Jonsson, J. O. (2021). Students’ Occupational Aspirations: Can Family Relationships Account for Differences Between Immigrant and Socioeconomic Groups? Child Development, 92(1),157–173. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13378 Super, D. E. (1980). A life-span, life-space approach to career development. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 16(3),282–298. https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-8791(80)90056-1