# _ii. Before the labor market: The role of norms_

Our second hypothesis is that streaming occurs well before men and women enter the labor market. This has important policy implications because some occupations and industries require occupation or industry specific human capital that needs to be accumulated starting at an early age. To become an engineer, for instance, one typically needs training at the tertiary level in the form of an engineering degree. But in order to pursue an engineering degree, one may need to have a minimum level of training in mathematics and science prior to entering university. This is affected by the choices one makes in choosing between the humanities and sciences tracks in high school, which may in turn be affected by a choice of which subjects to focus on in middle school. Consequently, decisions made at an early age may rule out specific occupations as career options at a later stage.

This is the case in Vietnam. Students must make choices that affect their career options early. Around age 15, they must decide on the field of study by choosing between exams in the social sciences and natural sciences, and between vocational and tertiary track. Those who choose vocational track, apply for technical training school, which may span from 6 months to 3 years. Those who choose tertiary track continue in school for grades 10 through 12, which allows to subsequently apply for a university.

We take advantage of existing data to probe the following question: do girls and boys aspire to different occupations as early as age 12? The threshold of 12 is chosen primarily due to data availability (discussed in the following section), but it coincides with the age at which gender differences in performance and psychological traits have been observed in economic literature (see for instance Fryer and Levitt, 2011). The literature in psychology suggests that orientation to sex roles forms as early as between the ages of 6 and 8<sup>2</sup> (Gottfredson, 1981, Bian, Leslie and Cimpian, 2017, Cvencek, Meltzoff and Greenwald, 2011). Based on these literatures, it seems reasonable to expect to see differences in aspirations at age 12 if our hypothesis is correct. Moreover, there is relatively little economic literature on the question of whether gender specific labor market preferences are shaped years before entering the labor market. Our work will be a first attempt to fill this gap,<sup>3</sup> and further work can address the question of at what age these preferences first emerge.

We map the occupations that the 12‐year‐old boys and girls in our data aspire to, to the average monetary and non‐monetary characteristics of these occupations in the concurrent labor force survey data. We construct the aspirations variable from the following survey question: “When you are about 25 years old, what job would you like to be doing?” Combining the two surveys allows us to answer the following question: if boys and girls succeed in pursuing occupations they aspire to at the age of 12, and the relative wages observed at the time of the survey do not change, would we observe a gender wage gap? It is important to note that we do not assume that boys and girls at 12 make choices based on expected earnings or non‐monetary characteristics. Rather, we believe that at an early age these aspirational choices are made based on idealized perceptions of jobs, where social norms play an important role. Social

> 2 Between the ages of 5 and 6, girls change from associating their own gender with “really, really smart” to associating boys with “really, really smart,” whereas boys change from associating their own gender with “really, really nice” to associating girls with “really, really nice (Bian, Leslie and Cimpian, 2017).

> 3 For literature in psychology and sociology, see for example Oosterbeek (2014) and Gneezy and Rustichini (2004).

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