NEW YORK, NY – In one of the most widely watched commencement speeches of all time, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs encouraged the 2005 Stanford graduation class to seek out their passions: “find what you love…the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, don’t settle.” However, a new research paper from Columbia Business School Post Doctoral Research Scholar Adriana Germano finds that when individuals are encouraged to follow their passions when choosing a career or academic major, women are less likely than men to pursue traditionally male-dominated industries like computer science, engineering, and physics, leading to gender disparities in STEM. Conversely, when individuals are encouraged to prioritize the financial aspect of a job or major, gender disparities are reduced, and women and men are more likely to gravitate toward more traditionally male-dominated industries. These findings shed light on the complex dynamics shaping career choices and the resulting gender imbalances in various industries.
In the study, Does the Follow-Your-Passions Ideology Cause Greater Academic and Occupational Gender Disparities Than Other Cultural Ideologies?, Adriana Germano and the research team conducted five pre- registered studies with more than 1,900 participants from across the U.S. – including people currently enrolled in higher education and those already working in their respective career fields. By conducting experiments, researchers found evidence that when women adhere to the “follow your passion” ideology – encouraging participants to allow their passions to guide their academic and occupational goals – they tend to shift toward picking careers with a lower proportion of men.
“Americans have all been told it’s important to follow our passions. However, it might be time for us to rethink this as the main advice we give to people making big educational and career decisions,” said Columbia Business School Postdoctoral Research Scholar Adriana Germano. “While following your passions is important, it is also important that we encourage people to keep more of an open mind to different career and educational opportunities they haven’t tried before. Our passions can box us in and prevent us from trying new things we could also be really good at. By trying a course in a new subject area or taking advantage of a new career opportunity at work, people may uncover new interests and passions they never knew they had.”
Adriana and her team of researchers including University of California Los Angeles Associate Professor Amanda Montoya and University of Washington researchers John Oliver Siy, Laura Vianna, Jovani Azpeitia, Shaoxiong Yan, and Professor Sapna Cheryan, began their research in 2011. The team of researchers conducted their studies to analyze if the “follow your passions” ideology increases gender disparities in traditionally male-dominated career fields. In a study with undergraduate college students, the researchers asked 112 students (65 women and 47 men) to rate how interested they would be in pursuing a major in computer science, engineering, and physics based on following their passions and also based on prioritizing job security and finances (i.e., resources ideology). The research team found that when students were prompted to use the follow-your-passions ideology, women were less interested than men in pursuing a major in computer science, engineering, and physics, however, when the same students were prompted to use the resources ideology, these disparities were reduced. To determine whether this was due to the traditionally more masculine nature of the advice to focus on job security and finances, the research team conducted another survey experiment on U.S. adults career decisions (538 participants; 263 women, 275 men) that compared the “follow-your-passions" and “resources” ideologies to a third more traditionally feminine ideology, “communal” (which encouraged participants to select a career that would allow them to nurture and emotionally support people). Again, the research team found that using the follow-your-passions ideology to make career decisions caused greater occupational gender disparities than the resources and communal ideology. In a final experiment with 672 U.S. adults (375 women, 297 men), the research team found that the gender disparities they consistently observed each time women and men were given the advice to follow their passions were driven by women’s greater tendency to draw on feminine aspects of themselves relative to men when they were both told to follow their passions. In other words, the research team found that when women and men are given the advice to follow their passions, the process of looking inwards to consider what they really care about led women to be more likely than men to draw on more feminine aspects of themselves, resulting in less-male dominated career and educational choices.
Additional Key Findings Include:
- Individualism and Freedom. The findings from this research illustrate that choices based on personal interests are not actually free, but socially constrained. Asserting individualism seems like it would reduce gender disparities, since “everyone is free to do what they want,” but this work provides empirical evidence that some individualistic ideologies paradoxically increase gender disparities. In countries outside of the United States, where students are encouraged to use factors outside of themselves to make academic and occupational decisions, gendered interests may have less power to shape decisions and may be less likely to result in gender disparities.
- Women’s and men’s career choices often align with “traditional” roles. The research team finds that women and men are more likely to choose gender-stereotypical careers when the “follow your passion” ideology is emphasized. However, promoting the idea to nurture and support people or to seek a career that will lead to financial stability led to a decrease in gender gaps. These findings suggest that even though the “follow your passions'' belief may not directly relate to gender, giving more traditionally feminine (nurture) or traditionally masculine (resources) career advice can reduce gender gaps. However, the research team does not suggest that U.S. students and workers avoid their passions in favor of a high-paying job they may not be interested in. Instead, they suggest that students and workers stay open to new opportunities and give things a try that they may not have originally thought they would like.
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