Openness to Gender Atypical Occupations in Youth: Do Peer Groups and School Classes Matter?

The article analyses aspects of gender composition and social dominance in peer groups and school classes and their effects on the degree of openness to gender-atypical occupations in young adolescents. The data set used contains information for some 13,000 girls and boys living in Stockholm in the early 1960s. Results from multi-level regressions show that gender composition is significantly related to openness to gender-atypical occupations at peer-group level only. As the causal direction of this relationship can be questioned, the result should be interpreted with caution. Concerning aspects of dominance, quite substantive effects on individual openness to gender-atypical occupations are found for girls, albeit not for boys. Thus, for girls, the degree of openness to gender-atypical occupations of the most central girl in the school class significantly affects the degree of openness to gender-atypical occupations of individual girls in that school class.