Self-Imposed Gender Pressure Shapes Children’s Career and Family Dreams

A large new study of Dutch children has found that the strongest force steering boys and girls toward stereotyped visions of their future careers and family lives is not their parents, not their friends, but the children themselves. Researchers surveyed 319 children aged 8 to 12 and discovered that the pressure kids place on themselves to act in gender-typical ways is consistently linked to more stereotyped career aspirations, a finding with significant implications for how societies might begin to dismantle occupational gender segregation years before children ever enter the workforce.

The research, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, comes from a team led by Jiefeng Ying of Beijing Normal University and Utrecht University, working alongside Chiara Antoniucci of Sapienza University of Rome, Xinchun Wu of Beijing Normal University, and Joyce J. Endendijk of Utrecht University. Their starting point is a puzzle that has intrigued social scientists for years: the Netherlands ranks among the most gender-equal countries in Europe, yet it sits below the European Union average on gender segregation in education, with far more women than men entering healthcare, teaching, and other care-oriented fields. This so-called gender-equality paradox, in which more egalitarian societies sometimes show larger gender differences in occupational interests, has been attributed to the persistence of cultural stereotypes, which change far more slowly than structural indicators of equality.

The researchers wanted to understand where these patterns begin. Gender gaps in career aspirations and in expected balance between work and family emerge as early as middle childhood, between the ages of 6 and 12, according to prior research. Theoretical frameworks of gender socialization, including gender schema theory and social cognitive theory, suggest that pressure to conform to gender norms is a key engine of these early differences. Children anticipate positive reactions to gender-typical behavior and negative reactions to gender-atypical behavior, and when these anticipated reactions are internalized, children become sources of conformity pressure in their own right. The study distinguishes between two forms of pressure: same-gender pressure, meaning anticipated encouragement of behavior typical for one’s own gender, and other-gender pressure, meaning anticipated discouragement of behavior typical for the other gender. Each form was measured as coming from three distinct sources: parents, peers, and the self.

The team recruited 257 Dutch families through social media parent groups and personal networks, ultimately analyzing data from 319 children, 44.5 percent of whom were boys, with an average age of just over 10 years. During home visits, children completed questionnaires on tablets under the supervision of research assistants while parents filled out their own surveys in a separate room. The hypotheses and analysis plan were preregistered on the Open Science Framework, and power analyses confirmed that the sample was large enough to detect even small effects. Because some families contributed more than one child, the researchers used Generalized Estimating Equations, a regression-based statistical technique designed to handle dependency among siblings clustered within the same families.

The measurement approach was notably creative. To assess children’s gender-typical expectations about future family versus career involvement, children were shown two same-gender adults, one working full-time and one staying home with children while working part-time, and asked which adult they thought they would be more like when grown up. To gauge the gender-typicality of desired careers, children answered the classic question of what they wanted to be when they grew up, and each answer was coded against official Dutch statistics on the proportion of men and women working in that occupation. Children’s gender typicality, meaning how similar they feel to boys and girls as groups, was measured with a validated graphical scale using circles of varying overlap.

The results confirmed that gender-typical patterns remain deeply entrenched even in this egalitarian society. Boys most often aspired to pedagogical careers, but overwhelmingly of the sports variety, with football player or coach accounting for over two-thirds of boys’ pedagogical ambitions, followed by technical fields and public administration. Girls also gravitated toward pedagogical work, but specifically as primary school teachers, followed by care and welfare professions and creative or linguistic pursuits. Both genders preferred careers dominated by same-gender workers, with average gender-typicality scores of 0.61 for boys and 0.60 for girls, well above the neutral midpoint of 0.50. Interestingly, one unpreregistered finding showed that children from higher socioeconomic status families aspired to less gender-typical careers, possibly reflecting exposure to more egalitarian parental role models.

One surprising result concerned family life. Both boys and girls expected to prioritize family over career in adulthood, and girls held significantly more gender-typical expectations on this dimension than boys. The researchers suggest this may reflect the distinctive Dutch context, as the Netherlands has the highest percentage of men and women working part-time in the world, meaning boys, like girls, may learn to value family involvement rather than absorbing the belief that men should be primarily career-driven. The familiarity of family settings compared to workplaces, along with the study’s depiction of a family-oriented adult who also worked part-time, may have further encouraged children to favor balanced work-life arrangements over full-time careers.

The central statistical story, however, revolved around self-imposed pressure. Less pressure children placed on themselves to engage in gender-typical behavior was consistently associated with less gender-typical career aspirations, a result the authors say supports the developmental theory of occupational aspirations, which holds that children prematurely circumscribe and compromise their career choices along gendered lines during middle childhood. Meanwhile, the link between lower self-imposed pressure to avoid other-gender behavior and less gender-typical family-versus-career expectations appeared only among children who scored high on gender typicality, that is, those who felt strongly similar to their own gender group. This mirrors earlier findings among Swiss adolescents, in which highly gender-typical individuals were most sensitive to changing gender norms.

Even more unexpected was the role of parents. Among children with high gender typicality, less parental encouragement of same-gender behavior was actually linked to more gender-typical career aspirations, a finding that runs counter to what social learning theory would predict. The researchers offer two explanations. For children whose gender-typical preferences are strongly internally motivated, additional parental pressure may be redundant or even counterproductive, thwarting children’s growing need for autonomy in middle childhood. Alternatively, given the cross-sectional design, the arrow of causation may run the other way: parents of children who already express strongly gender-typical aspirations may deliberately ease up on conformity pressure, hoping to encourage their children to explore a broader range of career options. Peer pressure, notably, showed no significant association with children’s gender-typical views at all.

Gender itself did not moderate the associations between felt pressure and gender-typical views, meaning boys and girls appeared similarly susceptible to conformity pressure when envisioning their futures, even though boys reported significantly more pressure overall from all three sources, both in the form of encouragement toward masculine behavior and discouragement of feminine behavior. Nor did pressure mediate the relationship between gender and gender-typical views, possibly because middle childhood is simply too early a developmental stage for accumulated conformity pressure to fully shape future-oriented thinking, with such pathways potentially strengthening during the gender intensification of adolescence. The authors caution that their sample was relatively affluent and highly educated, and that recruitment materials highlighting gender stereotypes may have attracted more egalitarian families, potentially explaining the low levels of other-gender pressure observed. Still, the practical message is clear: parents and youth professionals should focus on dismantling the internalized pressure children place on themselves to conform to gender norms, particularly for highly gender-typical children, and should affirm that deviating from gender norms is acceptable. Helping children choose careers and family roles based on their skills and talents rather than their gender, the researchers argue, could reduce the early roots of occupational segregation and open up more diverse, freely chosen futures for both boys and girls.

The study’s reliance on children’s own occupational knowledge offers a useful lens for interpreting its findings. By coding each career choice against official Dutch labor statistics, the researchers captured not just what children say they want to do, but how strongly those preferences align with the actual gender composition of the workforce they will one day enter. This method grounds abstract questions about stereotypes in concrete, measurable patterns of segregation that persist into adulthood.

The finding that boys reported more felt pressure overall than girls, across all three sources, adds nuance to the picture. It suggests that masculine behavior may be more tightly policed in middle childhood, consistent with earlier work showing that gender-atypical behavior in boys often draws stronger social sanctions than comparable behavior in girls. Yet despite this asymmetry in pressure, boys and girls proved equally susceptible to its influence on their future-oriented thinking.

The open-access status of the article means readers can consult the full preregistered analysis plan and measures directly. The use of sibling-aware statistical modeling also strengthens confidence that results are not inflated by shared family environments. As longitudinal follow-ups could clarify whether self-imposed pressure in middle childhood genuinely predicts later occupational choices, this dataset may prove a valuable baseline for tracking how these early gendered visions of work and family evolve through adolescence into adulthood.

Subject of Research: How felt pressure to conform to gender norms relates to gender-typical career and family aspirations in Dutch children aged 8 to 12.

Article Title: Associations Between Felt Pressure to Conform to Gender Norms, Gender Typicality, and Dutch Children’s Gender-Typical Views on Future Career and Family Life

Article References: Ying, J., Antoniucci, C., Wu, X., & Endendijk, J. J. (2026). Associations Between Felt Pressure to Conform to Gender Norms, Gender Typicality, and Dutch Children’s Gender-Typical Views on Future Career and Family Life. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03496-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03496-0

Keywords: gender norms, gender conformity pressure, gender typicality, career aspirations, work-family expectations, child development, gender socialization, occupational segregation, Dutch children, gender schema theory, family involvement, gender equality paradox