Explaining Gender Differences in Interests: The Roles of Instrumentality and Expressiveness

This study integrated Holland's themes within a modified social cognitive career theory (SCCT) model, exploring whether gender-related personality variables account for the relations between gender and vocational interests. Undergraduates (N = 452) completed expressiveness, instrumentality, and realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional (RIASEC)-based measures of learning experiences, self-efficacy, and interests. Through structural equation modeling, the paths via expressiveness and instrumentality fully explained gender's effect on artistic and conventional interests, respectively. The paths through instrumentality partially explained gender's effect on investigative and enterprising interests, while gender's effect on social interest was partially explained through expressiveness and instrumentality when considering the path without self-efficacy. The paths through expressiveness and instrumentality partially explained gender's effect on realistic interests. Adding direct paths from learning experiences to interests improved model fit for realistic, artistic, and social models. These results demonstrate the utility of concurrently assessing the RIASEC and SCCT frameworks to delineate factors that influence gender differences in vocational interests.