The effects of reading career materials containing nontraditional role models were studied. Ninth-grade students (N = 288) read job descriptions derived in part from interviews with people who have careers that are nontraditional for their sex. They then rated occupations as appropriate for men, women, or both men and women. Jobs read about received significantly more "both" responses than jobs not read about. Also, females chose more "both" responses than males, and all students assigned "both" ratings more often to male sextyped jobs than to female sex-typed jobs. Results suggest three major conclusions: (a) Student attitudes toward sex-typed careers can be changed by exposure to career information containing nontraditional role models, (b) Females have less sex-typed attitudes about the sex-appropriateness of careers than do males, (c) All students think it is more appropriate for women to enter traditionally male careers than for men to enter traditionally female careers.
Attitudes of Navajo 7th graders toward nontraditional occupations were studied using a projective technique derived from the work of Getzels and Walsh (1958). Subjects for the study were 210 Navajo students in three school settings: a public school in a small reservation community; a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding school in the same community but serving children from a sparsely populated area of the reservation; and a larger BIA school located in a different community and serving a less isolated part of the reservation. The Navajo participants in the present research expressed less negative attitudes than any other group studied by the authors. Significant effects were found for both school setting (p < .0001) and the interaction of setting and occupational sex type. Rather than interpreting these findings to mean that Navajos are more accepting of nontraditional occupations, the authors assert that limited contacts with the institutions and materials that transmit the biases of the majority culture may have contributed to Navajo student's being less aware of the sex types associated with particular jobs.The purpose of this research was to investigate attitudes of American Indian youth toward occupations that are nontraditional for a given gender, that is, occupations in which less than 20% of the workers are of one gender. In recent years, considerable research interest has focused on occupational preferences of young people and, in particular, their attitudes toward nontraditional careers (cf. Ashby & Wittmaier,
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