Gender pay gap ‘perpetuated by girls who want lower-paid jobs’

THE gender pay gap is perpetuated by teenage girls who want jobs that happen to pay less, a study has found.

While teenage girls have higher aspirations than boys to attend university, their male counterparts tend to have ambitions towards professions with bigger salaries, according to research by University College London’s Institute for Education.

Professor Lucinda Platt, one of the authors of the study, said that the findings highlighted the “importance of recognising the role of both boys’ and girls’ choices in perpetuating labour market inequalities”.

She added that teenagers should be “encouraged and supported to think beyond gender stereotypes” and consider a full range of future career options.

On average, girls thought they had a 71 per cent chance of going to university, with 14 per cent of girls certain they would go, researchers found.

Meanwhile, the average expectation of boys was 63 per cent, with just under 10 per cent convinced they would get to university.

When asked about their ideal job, the average hourly wage for the occupations that girls aspired to was 27 per cent – or £6.49 – lower than boys.

The research team analysed data collected from over 7,700 teenagers in the UK who are all part of the Millennium Cohort Study, which has followed their lives since they were born at the turn of the century.

When they were 14, the teenagers were asked a series of questions to find out their future aspirations.

While the most popular jobs for boys and girls included some highly paid careers, the pay among the jobs girls aspired to was, on average, much lower.

This remained the case even after excluding from the calculations aspirations among a number of the boys to be highly paid professional sportsmen.

For girls, the most popular jobs that they said they aspired to were the medical profession, a secondary schoolteacher, a singer, the legal profession, a vet, a nurse and a midwife.

For boys, it was a professional sportsman, a software developer, an engineer, the Army, an architect and a secondary schoolteacher.

Both genders tended to favour jobs where the workforce was dominated by their own sex.