Informed Choices: Gender Gaps in Career Advice

Key Issue

College students often seek career advice from their social and professional networks, and the information that students receive may shape their perceptions of careers and influence their decision-making. But do all students have access to the same information? In our new working paper, we investigate whether student gender causally affects the information that students receive regarding various career paths.

Approach and Methodology

We conducted a large-scale field experiment, in which college students who were interested in learning about various careers sent messages to 10,000 working professionals on a popular online professional networking platform. These preformulated questions requested basic information about the professional’s career path. Importantly, to test whether student gender affects the information students receive about careers, we randomized whether the message received by the professional came from a male or a female student. In our analysis, we focus on two career attributes that prior research has shown to differentially affect the labor market choices of women: work/life balance and workplace culture.

Key Findings and Conclusions

Our main finding is that student gender influences the information that professionals provide. When students ask a broad question about the pros/cons of the professional’s field, professionals are more than twice as likely to bring up work/life balance issues to female students than they are to male students. One explanation for this greater emphasis on work/life balance issues with female students is that professionals believe female students care more about this career attribute than male students do. We find, however, that when students pose a question asking specifically whether work/life balance is a concern, professionals are still more willing to discuss this issue with female students, with female students receiving 28 percent more responses than male students. In contrast, professionals bring up the matter of workplace culture issues to male and female students in equal proportion. The evidence suggests that gender gaps in accessing career information may matter for career choices. Information provided relating to work/life balance tends to be negative and increase students’ concern about the issue. At the end of the study, we find that female students are more deterred from their preferred career path than male students. This is partly explained by the greater emphasis on work/life balance issues in relation to female students.

Authors

Yana Gallen

Melanie Wasserman

Publication

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