An examination of gender imbalance in Scottish adolescents’ vocational interests
Abstract
This paper documents Scottish adolescents’ vocational interest types. Our research is based on the responses of 1,306 pupils from 18 secondary schools to an empirically verified online interest inventory test. Our results are threefold. First, the structural validity of the test with the Scottish sample is confirmed by evaluating the underlying circumplex structure of Holland’s RIASEC vocational interests. Second, gender distribution along the six primary vocational interest dimensions is consistent with the research literature: young men scoring higher on the Realistic vocational interest and young women scoring higher on the Social dimension. Finally, we observe that across dimensions, vocational interests of young women are less diverse than those of young men. We discuss how these dissimilarities could lead to differences in education choice and career decision-making.
Citation
Lasselle , L , Schelfhout , S , Fonteyne , L , Kirby , G , Smith , I & Duyck , W 2021 , ' An examination of gender imbalance in Scottish adolescents’ vocational interests ' , PLoS ONE , vol. 16 , no. 9 , e0257723 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0257723
Publication
PLoS ONE
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1932-6203Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright: © 2021 Lasselle et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.