Exploring the links between gender-(a)typical career aspirations and educational choices: Heterogeneous developmental pathways.

Developmental psychologists often focus on specific male- or female-dominated job categories (e.g., sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics or math-intensive jobs) to understand the causes of persistent gender-typical educational and career choices. However, the proportion of men and women can vary substantially within the same category (e.g., biology vs. physics). Accordingly, this study examined heterogeneous developmental trajectories of adolescents' career preferences using data from a representative sample of German academic-track 9th-12th-grade students (N = 4,759, 56% female). We linked adolescents' career preferences with census data on the proportion of women in each preferred occupation. Fifty-two percent of the participants aspired to a gender-segregated career by 12th grade. Growth mixture analyses revealed five distinct developmental patterns: stable preferences for male-dominated (21%, n = 920), female-dominated (22%, n = 983), or gender-neutral careers (48%, n = 2,276), and shifts from male-to-female-dominated (6%, n = 280) or neutral-to-male-dominated (6%, n = 300) career aspirations. These patterns predicted differences in mean level and growth of subject-specific academic beliefs, the gender ratios of subsequent choices of advanced math or language arts classes, and more gender-typical university majors. Aspiring to male-dominated careers related to positive academic development in the math domain; aspiring to female-dominated careers related to positive development in the verbal domain. Boys aspiring to neutral or female-dominated careers experienced more positive development in the verbal domain than girls. Highly performing girls in math tended to change to male-dominated careers later in school, but highly performing boys in math were on a stable-male trajectory throughout high school. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).