1 Gender and Professional Career Plans of High School Students in Comparative Perspective

The time when young women left the labour force upon marriage, and thus had much more modest educational and occupational expectations than young men, belongs to history. Recent studies in the USA and Canada show that at 15, girls now plan to attain higher levels of education and are more determined to enter professional careers than boys. We seek to establish whether this is the case in many different cultures and socio-economic conditions. To this end, we analyse the data from the 2006 round of the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted in over 50 countries. First we establish whether girls are more ambitious than boys across countries when we control for the variation in academic ability, home and school environments. Second we examine the possibility that the attraction to professional occupations can be explained by gender-typed choices, i.e. girls ’ preference for nursing and teaching versus boys ’ determination to enter trades. Third, we examine how school characteristics, i.e. the proportion of female students, school resources, socio-economic characteristics of parents as well as the macro-social contexts, i.e. labour market opportunities open to women, may help girls set higher achievement goals. Finally, we consider how likely are girls, compared to boys, to answer questions about career plans, because any gender bias in the patterns of missing data might affect the overall conclusions. We conclude by discussing the implications of these gender differences, with a special focus on a dilemma they may pose for policy makers