Things versus People: Gender Differences in Vocational Interests and in Occupational Preferences
利用瑞士学徒制中130个职业的认知要求数据，发现女性倾向于选择与人打交道的职业，男性则偏好与事物相关的职业，且这一差异是职业性别隔离的重要预测因素。
Occupational choices remain strongly segregated by gender, for reasons not yet fully understood. In this paper, we use detailed information on the cognitive requirements in 130 distinct learnable occupations in the Swiss apprenticeship system to describe the broad job content in these occupations along the things-versus-people dimension. We first show that our occupational classification along this dimension closely aligns with actual job tasks, taken from an independent data source on employers job advertisements. We then document that female apprentices tend to choose occupations that are oriented towards working with people, while male apprentices tend to favor occupations that involve working with things. In fact, our analysis suggests that this variable is by any statistical measure among the most important proximate predictors of occupational gender segregation. In a further step, we replicate this finding using individual-level data on both occupational aspirations and actual occupational choices for a sample of adolescents at the start of 8th grade and the end of 9th grade, respectively. Using these additional data, we finally show that the gender difference in occupational preferences is largely independent of a large number of individual, parental, and regional controls.