Do occupational aspirations of children help to explain ethnic differences in labour market outcomes?

Across the UK’s ethnic groups there is substantial variation in labour market outcomes, driven in part by differences in occupational concentration. Yet we lack insight into whether these outcomes may be shaped, in part, by differences in preferences deriving from group-level cultural socialisation. We shed light on this question using the nationally representative Millennium Cohort Study. We study the occupational aspirations of girls and boys prior to school completion, matching these aspirations to job characteristics drawn from the Labour Force Survey across the two dimensions of value and gender-typicality. We estimate growth curve models tracking the value and gender-typicality of the aspired job from early childhood into adolescence, and test how far trajectories are consistent with theoretical expectations about the influence of group-level characteristics. We find that differences between ethnic groups are small; but those that exist do not support the contention that preferences are shaped by cultural socialisation in the ways theorised. Minority girls aspire to higher-paid occupations than their majority counterparts, and this is the case for those both from more and from less traditional and disadvantaged communities. We conclude there is a need to revisit cultural accounts of labour market outcomes among the children of immigrants.