Gendered university major choice: the role of intergenerational transmission

Julia Philipp ()
Additional contact information
Julia Philipp: London School of Economics

Journal of Population Economics, 2023, vol. 36, issue 2, No 16, 1049-1097

Abstract: Abstract In this paper, I study the role of gender-typical parental occupation for young adults’ gender-typical university major choice using data on a recent cohort of university students in Germany. Results show significant intergenerational associations between the gender typicality in parental occupation and young adults’ majors. As to why these effects occur, findings suggest that the transfer of occupation-specific resources from parents to their children plays an important role and that a transmission of gender roles explains at least some of the father-son associations. The paper contributes to existing literature by introducing a novel measure that operationalises the extent to which majors and occupations are ‘typically female’ or ‘typically male’ and by studying different transmission channels.

Keywords: Gender norms; Gender roles; University major choice; Intergenerational transmission; I23; J16; J24; Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00148-022-00900-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jopoec:v:36:y:2023:i:2:d:10.1007_s00148-022-00900-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... tion/journal/148/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00148-022-00900-6

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Population Economics is currently edited by K.F. Zimmermann

More articles in Journal of Population Economics from Springer, European Society for Population Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().