(aged either 1 or 8) were randomly selected into the sample in each community. Three more rounds of data collection took place in 2006 (Round 2), 2009 (Round 3) and 2013 (Round 4) – when the children were aged between 11 and 12 years (the Younger Cohort) and between 18 and 19 years (the Older Cohort). We use data from Round 4 for Younger Cohort. We prefer these data for two reasons. First, round 4 of data collection falls within the time‐frame of the LFS data we use for the study, and second, due to differences in the questionnaires administered to the older and younger cohort, fine measures of cognitive ability are only available for the younger cohort in this round.

We use data from the child questionnaire to explore gender differences in aspirations for a future job, controlling for cognitive ability. The Young Lives project used the Raven’s Matrix test in the first round and a Peabody Picture Vocabulary test in the following rounds, using Itemized Response Theory (IRT) in subsequent rounds to provide a standardized and comparable measure of cognitive ability across the rounds. For the 4<sup>th</sup> round, the PPVT test was only administered to the younger cohort; the older cohort was given math and vocabulary tests.

We match the occupation that children claim they would like to have when they are 25 years old to occupations in the 2013 LFS (same year as Round 4) so that we can create the monetary and non‐monetary characteristics associated with these aspirational occupations based on the LFS data. On‐line Appendix provides more details on the matching procedure.

Our final source of data allows us to examine the relationship between field of study and occupation, and comes from the World Bank’s Skills Towards Employability and Productivity (STEP) program. The STEP program is a World Bank initiative to measure the relationship between skills, employability and productivity in low‐ and middle‐income countries. STEP targets the urban working age population, defined as all adults aged 15‐64. In Vietnam, the surveys were carried out in Ha Noi and Ho Chi Minh City, with households selected through a process of stratified random selection and the primary respondent within each household chosen at random. We use data from the first wave of STEP surveys carried out by the World Bank in Vietnam in 2012, since this falls within the time period covered by our LFS data.

STEP includes an employee module and an employer module and covers 3,405 adults, of whom 2,037 are women. We use data from the employee module and restrict our analysis to adults who are currently employed as employees (rather than employers or self‐employed) to make the sample comparable to the pool of wageworkers from the LFS. This reduces the sample to 1,316 observations (643 women).

The STEP data have information on occupation and industry at the 3‐digit level, which is one level of aggregation up from the 4‐digit classification available in LFS. Nevertheless, this corresponds to over 100 occupations and industries in our data. STEP makes a distinction between general and vocational education, using a different survey question to capture the level of educational attainment in each. We combine the responses to these questions and simplify the levels of response to make them similar to the ICSED‐08 classification system used in the LFS. This leaves us with 8 levels of education (details of mapping are presented in Appendix III).

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