The "follow your passions" career advice may keep some women and girls from pursuing STEM fields ... [+]
Young adults embarking on new careers are often advised to follow their passions. However, a new study shows that this advice may narrow people’s career choices and contribute to the lack of women in STEM fields.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs recommended that graduating students follow their passions in a commencement speech he gave at Stanford University. "You've got to find what you love….Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle," Jobs instructed.
Jobs wasn't alone; similar advice has been doled out in commencement addresses, books and blogs for decades. As evidence of its growing popularity, the phrase “follow your passions” was forty times more likely to appear in English-language books in 2019 compared to 1990. Although the advice is popular in the United States, in other countries, advice often centers around finding a lucrative career that provides a good income and job security.
Researchers compared how these two types of advice, follow your passions versus follow the money, impacted career choice and fields of study. They found that the follow-your-passions advice led to more gender disparities.
The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that when both students and adults were advised to follow their passions, they chose fields that were more consistent with what was expected of their gender. Women chose jobs in the arts or healthcare. Men chose careers in science and business. In other words, women were more likely to choose stereotypically feminine fields, while men were more likely to choose stereotypically masculine ones.
However, when study participants were advised to think about job security, earning money and other practical concerns, the gender differences in occupational choice and field of study decreased. Women who were given this advice were more likely to choose lucrative careers in male-dominated STEM fields, like computer science and engineering.
Oliver Siy, the lead author of the research and user experience researcher at Google, commented on how this seemingly innocuous inspirational advice offered to students and graduates could lead to gender segregation at work. "There's no mention of gender in the follow-your-passions ideology. It doesn't reference gender at all on its surface, yet it can lead to these gendered outcomes. And it makes me wonder what other aspects of our lives we're exposed to that lead to gendered outcomes," he says. Siy completed the research while a graduate student at the University of Washington.
Despite their findings, the researchers do not suggest that job seekers forego happiness and slug it out at a stable, well-paying job they hate. Instead, the researchers suggest that the follow-your-passions advice may lead women to overlook male-dominated fields as potential passions without ever giving them a fair chance. People often decide on their passions based on stereotypes, with little hands-on evidence about what they are actually like. "As a result, the follow-your-passions ideology may limit people to certain fields rather than giving them the opportunity to explore other fields that they may be passionate about," the researchers conclude in their paper.
Siy doesn’t buy into the idea that men and women have inherently different interests due to their biology or gender identification. "There's a tendency to view an interest as something that is inherent or that resides in you. But I think there's a lot of socialization that takes place that influences what we become interested in," Siy explains. As a result of different socialization and experiences, women and men develop unique interests. Telling people to follow their passions encourages them to home in on the interests they’ve already developed instead of trying new ones.
Other studies have also concluded that “follow your passions” may not be the best advice for job seekers because it conveys that passions are fixed and unchanging. Researchers found that some people believe their core interests will never change, while others believe that interests develop and change over time. Those who believe that interests can grow and morph over time (often referred to as the growth theory of interests) have a healthier outlook and are open to pursuing more areas. "The growth theory leads people to express greater interest in new areas, to anticipate that pursuing interests will sometimes be challenging, and to maintain greater interest when challenges arise," these researchers conclude.
To truly inspire those embarking on new careers to expand their horizons, we need to communicate that interests aren’t fixed and can develop over time. In his 2015 commencement speech at Columbia University, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz reversed the typical advice, suggesting to the graduating class, "Don't follow your passions." He warned them that passions change with time and added that people are not necessarily good at what they are passionate about.
Ultimately, Horowitz questioned the notion that doing what you love leads to success. He explained to the graduates, "If you poll 1,000 people who are successful, they'll all say that they love what they do. And so, the broad conclusion of the world is that if you do what you love, then you'll be successful. But we're engineers, and we know that that might be true. But it also might be the case that if you're successful, you love what you do. You just love being successful."
