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Essay On Science Career Aspirations

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Mayrhofer, Meyer, Steyrer, Strunk and Schiffinger (2014) describe a career aspiration as a cluster of needs, motives and behaviour intentions which individuals articulate with respect to different career fields. Therefore science career aspirations are science educational targets or job related ambitions in a science field that one sets for oneself. Career aspirations represent a type of mental self-selection where individuals predict their chances to succeed in a variety of fields and choose those fields where they predict the highest probability of success with reference to their personal strengths and weaknesses.
By high school, gender differences in selection of tasks that are of importance to science and math career fields emerge (Correll, …show more content…

Girls science aspirations have been lowered by gender stereotypes as there is a widely held view that science and math careers are predominantly done by men (Aspires, 2013; AAUW,1992; Correll, 2001; Hoover, 1998; Atieno & Odongo, 2012). These stereotypes influence self-concept which in turn influences educational or career aspirations and expectations (Atieno & Odongo, 2012). Girls who take up sciences instead of being viewed as talented or gifted are instead seen as odd, deviant and masculine (Aspires, 2013). This makes girls fear success in science and maths fields thinking that this will make them loss their femininity and in the long run this lowers their science career aspirations. Carrello (2001) urged that cultural beliefs about gender tend to bias peoples perceptions of their competence at various career relevant tasks to an extent that people make career choices basing on these gender differentiated perceptions rather than their actual abilities. This is preventing many females from moving along education paths that would have led them to science and math career …show more content…

In a survey by Greenburg-lake (1991) for AAUW, it was observed that in elementary school, 75% of the girls who liked science dropped to 70% by middle school and to 63% by high school which is a faster decline as compared to the boys who dropped from 82% to 76% to 75% in elementary, middle and high school respectively. Similarly, from elementary to high school girls who liked math dropped by 20% from 81% to 61% as compared to boys who only dropped by 7% from 82% to 75%. It was noted that in all stages boys had a high liking of science and math than girls and as AAUW (1992) noted, adolescents who like science and math were more likely to aspire for careers in science and math fields meaning that girls who liked them less had lower science and math career aspirations as compared to the boys who liked them

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