Two aspects of the relation between parents' perceptions of their children and children's self- and task perceptions in math and English were investigated: (a) the mediating role of parents' perceptions between grades and adolescents' self-perceptions and (b) the gendered nature of parents' perceptions. Data for this study are part of a longitudinal investigation (the Michigan Study of Adolescent Life Transitions). Data from 914 sixth-grade adolescents and their parents are used in this article. Results showed that parents' perceptions mediate the relation between children's grades and children's self- and task perceptions in both domains. Parents' perceptions had a stronger influence on children's perceptions than children's own grades. Significant but low correlations between gender and self- and task perceptions were found in both math and English.

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We examined 2 hypotheses regarding why some young women do not maintain their espoused occupational aspirations in male-dominated fields from late adolescence through young adulthood. The first hypothesis concerns attitudes towards math and science; the second concerns the desire for job flexibility. The sample of young women (N ¼ 104) was taken from a larger longitudinal investigation of approximately 1,000 young women from a midwestern metropolitan area in Michigan, USA, who were followed from age 18 (in 1990) to age 25 (1997). Findings suggest that desire for a flexible job, high time demands of an occupation, and low intrinsic value of physical science were the best predictors of women changing their occupational aspirations out of maledominated fields. These results suggest that despite the women's movement and more efforts in society to open occupational doors to traditional male-jobs for women, concerns about balancing career and family, together with lower value for science-related domains, continue to steer young women away from occupations in traditionally male-dominated fields, where their abilities and ambitions may lie.

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