• How do occupational aspirations of girls and boys from di erent ethnic groups compare?
• To what extent do they feed through into subsequent occupational outcomes?
These are the questions addressed by this report based on large scale nationally representative data on boys and girls from age 7-age 14 and on young people aged 25.
It finds:
• Ethnic minority boys and girls have higher occupational aspirations (aspirations for well-paid jobs) compared to White children of the same sex.
• This is the case across the age range measured.
• While boys’ aspirations tend to start higher and show some decline over time, the opposite is the case for girls
• This leads to some convergence between boys’ and girls’ aspirations overall.
• In most cases, ethnic minority boys and girls have higher aspirations than their White counterparts already at around age 7. This shows that minority group families are not ‘socialising’ their children into ‘lower’ aspirations.
• By age 14 gaps between minority group girls and White girls are marked, suggesting that as they move towards their GCSEs, minority group girls are particularly looking forward to good jobs.
• Comparing these aspirations with the wages of jobs actually held by ethnic minority children at age 25, ethnic minorities are not achieving the levels of occupational success they aspire to – with the exception of Indian young women.
• There is no evidence that ethnic minorities are ‘choosing’ to go into lower paid occupations.
Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at Occupational aspirations of children from primary school to teenage years across ethnic groups
Discussion
No comments yet.