Constraints into preferences: Gender, status, and emerging career aspirations

How do gender differences in career choic-es emerge? Understanding the gendered nature of the career choice process is important since, to the extent that men and women make different career-relevant choices throughout their lives, the labor force will continue to be segregated by gender. Gender segregation in paid work is stubbornly resilient, persisting despite other structural changes in society, changes such as the vast movement of women into paid work in recent decades (Jacobs 1989, 1995a; Jacobsen 1994; Reskin 1993) and the transformation of work content due to techno-logical changes and the increase in service sec-tor jobs (England 1981; Game and Pringle 1983; Reskin and Roos 1990; Tienda and Ortiz 1987). The distribution of men and women into dif-ferent kinds of occupations, firms, and estab-lishments is consequential, explaining the majority of the gender gap in wages (Peterson and Morgan 1995). Many explanations of this continued segre-gation have examined the impact of “demand-side ” processes, a phrase referring to processes that lead to a greater demand for men when f illing more desirable jobs (Anker 1997