Positive career choice
Nowadays there are very few jobs that can only be done by women or only by men. Despite this fact, Britain remains a place where many jobs are still mainly done by men or mainly by women.
A lot of work has been done in recent years to try to put this right. Old fashioned views which pigeonholed men and women into certain jobs are, thankfully, disappearing.
Read on to find out why it is important to be open to all possibilities regardless of gender.
What is gender stereotyping?
What is wrong with gender stereotyping?
Gender stereotyping and young people
Gender stereotyping in Career Choice
What is gender stereotyping?
It's about making assumptions about the roles of men and women in society.
Although progress has been made in recent decades, traditional gender roles continue. For example, three quarters of working women are still found in just five types of job group.
What is wrong with gender stereotyping?
Beliefs about the roles that men and women should have limit an individual's choices. This can lead to:
- Wasted talent and unfulfilled potential: There is a wide range of jobs in areas such as the service sector and IT where school leavers may miss out because they see such jobs as more suitable for the opposite gender.
- Skills shortages: Employers in the UK have major skills shortages. It is the sectors, such as construction, with the lowest numbers of women which have the most severe skills shortages.
- Lower pay in those jobs which are seen as ‘women's work' even when they require similar qualifications.
Sex role stereotyping leads to discrimination against both women and men.
Gender stereotyping and young people
Stereotyping has a huge effect on young people. Research shows that young people are still following traditional sex stereotyped patterns when it comes to:
- choosing school subjects:
- Fact: in 2000/2001 79% of Standard Grade home economics students were girls, 64% of physics students were boys
- choice of career:
- Fact: 90% of engineering jobs are held by men; 93% of primary school teachers in Scotland are women
Should your job choice and earning power be limited by whether you are male or female?
Gender Stereotyping in Career Choice
A survey carried out by The Employment Research Institute at Napier University
IntroductionPreliminary Findings
Recommendations
Introduction
A recent survey of ‘Attitudes to Careers' was carried out among S2 and S3 pupils in Edinburgh and West Lothian schools. The researchers concentrated on two key issues:
- how suitable pupils thought they were for different jobs
- the gender stereotyping of jobs.
Preliminary Findings
When it came to subject choice atS2/S3 :
- Computing, P.E., Craft & Design and Physics were particularly popular with boys
- Administration, Art, Biology, Home Economics and French were favoured by girls
There were significant differences in how girls and boys rated themselves as suitable for different jobs:
- 57% of girls, but only 11% of boys, thought they were suited to nursing.
- 63% of boys, but only 10% of girls thought they were suited to engineering.
The research also showed that
- Boys held more stereotypical views about who was best suited to particular jobs than girls.
- Mothers were the most important source of advice about careers for girls (51%)
- The higher a pupil's level of academic achievement the less likely they were to gender stereotype jobs.
Recommendations
More needs to be done:
- to encourage young men into jobs traditionally seen as female, since boys' likes and attitudes are still strongly gender stereotyped
- to tackle girls' reluctance to work in jobs traditionally perceived as male
Full report
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