Gendered Occupational Aspirations: A Comparison of Young Native-Born and Turkish Minority Women

Abstract

Declining birth rates, an ageing population and the goal to remain globally competitive and prosperous puts pressure on the German labour market and increases the demands for greater labour force participation of women. Women with a migration background constitute a growing share of the German population, but a disproportionally lower share of the total labour force. We focused on the gender-specific occupational preferences of female adolescents with a Turkish migration background compared to those without any migration background and related these preferences to the young women’s interests, family orientations, normative gender role perceptions, and the socioeconomic status of the aspired profession in our analyses. Contrary to our expectations, our results indicate that Turkish girls less often aspire to female-dominated occupations than majority native-born girls. Instead, they prefer integrated occupations, which tend to be more prestigious and better paid. This might be mostly due to their ambitious occupational aspirations, because the gap between native-born and Turkish girls is reduced substantively after controlling for aspirations.