The Dual Impact of Gender on Career Paths and Success

When we think about why men and women end up in different careers, earn different salaries, or make different choices about work and family, the answers are rarely simple. German psychologist Andrea Abele developed a framework – the Dual Impact Model of Gender and Career-Related Processes – that helps untangle this complexity. The model argues that gender shapes career outcomes through two simultaneous channels: from the inside, through how individuals see themselves, and from the outside, through how society sees and categorizes them. Understanding both forces is essential to making sense of the real and persistent career disparities that data continue to document today.

Inside and outside: Abele’s dual-impact framework 🔗

Abele’s model, first published in 2000 in The Developmental Social Psychology of Gender, distinguishes between two distinct perspectives through which gender operates in the context of career. The inside perspective refers to gender as a component of an individual’s self-concept – the internalized beliefs, values, and traits a person associates with being a man or a woman. The outside perspective refers to gender as a social category – the expectations, norms, and evaluations that society directs at people based on their perceived gender.

These are not parallel forces that operate independently. They interact constantly. A person’s self-concept is shaped by the social environment, and social expectations are reinforced when individuals act in line with them. This feedback loop means that career choices are rarely purely personal decisions; they are the product of a complex negotiation between who we believe we are and what the world tells us we should be.

The inside perspective: Agency, communion, and self-concept 🔗

At the heart of the inside perspective are two psychological dimensions that Abele draws from a broader tradition in social psychology: agency and communion. These represent two fundamentally different orientations toward the self and others.

Agency is a self-focused orientation centered on goal achievement, assertiveness, competence, and independence. Communion is an other-focused orientation built around warmth, empathy, cooperation, and concern for relationships. Critically, agency tends to be associated with masculine stereotypes and communion with feminine ones – though both dimensions exist across all individuals regardless of gender.

The relevance to careers is direct. Research by Abele and Spurk tracking over 1,000 highly educated professionals across a decade found that the agentic component of a person’s self-concept significantly influenced both the number of hours worked and objective career success – measured by salary and professional status – for both women and men. The communal component, by contrast, was more strongly linked to decisions about parenthood and interpersonal priorities. In other words, how agentic or communal a person sees themselves to be has measurable downstream consequences for their career trajectory.

This matters because, on average, women are more likely to internalize communal traits as central to their identity, and men are more likely to center agentic traits. These are not biological inevitabilities – they are the product of gender socialization that begins in early childhood and intensifies through adolescence. Studies on adolescent self-descriptions confirm that girls are more likely to describe themselves in communal terms and boys in agentic terms, with these patterns sharpening as they move through their teenage years. The self-concepts formed during this period directly influence the educational and career choices that follow.

The outside perspective: Social categories and expectations 🔗

The outside perspective captures something that no individual can fully control: the expectations that society attaches to gender categories. According to Abele’s framework, this outside perspective defines the conditions under which men’s and women’s behaviors are evaluated differently – and often unequally – because of the roles society assigns to each group.

One clear example is leadership. Research shows that women are frequently seen as less suited to leadership roles not because of demonstrated ability, but because of a perceived mismatch between the communal traits associated with femininity and the agentic qualities associated with effective leadership. This expectation operates whether or not any individual woman has a communal self-concept. The social category she belongs to carries its own set of presumptions that she must navigate, often regardless of her actual behavior or ambitions.

The role of gender expectations in career choices 🔗

Society’s expectations about gender do not sit passively in the background. They actively shape the decisions people make – about what to study, which jobs to pursue, whether to prioritize advancement, and how to manage the relationship between work and family.

Work-family conflict and the parenthood penalty 🔗

One of the most documented areas where gendered expectations shape career decisions is the work-family intersection. Abele and Spurk’s longitudinal findings are striking on this point: parenthood had a significant negative influence on women’s objective career success, primarily because it led to reduced working hours and career interruptions during their children’s early years. For men, the same transition to parenthood had either no effect or a slightly positive effect on career success.

This asymmetry is not random. It reflects the outside perspective at work: strong societal expectations direct mothers to reduce their professional commitments when children are young, while fathers are expected to fulfill a breadwinner function. Women who become mothers early in their careers show the largest long-term disadvantage – those who had their first child around career entry were, on average, the least professionally successful over the decade-long observation period.

This is not simply a matter of individual preference. Mothers with partners who work full time were found to reduce their own work hours more than mothers with partners in other employment arrangements, suggesting that household structure and gendered divisions of domestic labor directly feed into professional outcomes. The inside and outside perspectives reinforce each other: a woman who has internalized communal values may genuinely prioritize family, while simultaneously facing an environment that makes combining intensive careers with caregiving structurally difficult.

Occupational segregation as a reflection of gendered expectations 🔗

Gendered expectations also shape which careers men and women consider as realistic or appropriate for themselves – a process that contributes directly to occupational segregation. Research on adolescent career choices shows that girls who prioritize communal career goals – work that involves helping, caring, and cooperating – are steered toward fields like education, social work, and healthcare, while boys who prioritize agentic goals gravitate toward engineering, finance, and management. These patterns emerge long before anyone enters the job market.

The outcome is a labor market in which certain industries are heavily dominated by one gender. Data from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research illustrate the extent of this clustering: three in four workers in education and health services are women, while nine in ten construction workers and seven in ten manufacturing workers are men. This sorting is not merely cultural residue – it has direct wage consequences, because occupations that become predominantly female tend over time to be paid less than those that remain predominantly male, even when skill and education levels are comparable.

Gender and career disparities: When the gap becomes measurable 🔗

When the inside and outside perspectives of gender are both pushing in the same direction – shaping self-concepts, constraining choices, and structuring expectations – the result is measurable inequality in career outcomes. This shows up most clearly in wage data and in the cumulative costs of occupational and career sacrifices.

The gender wage gap 🔗

According to Pew Research Center analysis, in 2024 women earned an average of 85 cents for every dollar earned by men, based on median hourly earnings across full- and part-time workers. This represents a narrowing from 81 cents in 2003, but the pace of change has been slow. For full-time, year-round workers, the U.S. Census Bureau puts the figure at 81 cents per dollar – and for women of color, the gap is considerably wider. Latina women working full-time earned just 57.8 cents for every dollar earned by a White man, and Black women earned 66.5 cents.

The wage gap is not uniform across occupations. IWPR analysis found that women were paid less than men in all 20 of the largest detailed occupations for women. The gap ranges from relatively small in some roles to a 28.7 percent gap for Financial Managers – where women’s median weekly earnings were $1,497 compared to men’s $2,100. Only one occupation out of 134 analyzed showed women earning more than men.

Part of this gap is attributable to occupational segregation – women are overrepresented in lower-paying fields. But even within the same occupations and with comparable qualifications, a gap persists. Data from the Economic Policy Institute highlight a particularly revealing pattern: women with advanced degrees earn less per hour on average than men with only a college degree, underscoring that credentials alone do not neutralize the gender earnings disadvantage.

Occupational sacrifices and career continuity 🔗

Beyond wages, gender disparities show up in the career paths people take and the opportunities they forego. Women are more likely to take career breaks, shift to part-time work, or decline advancement opportunities in order to manage caregiving responsibilities – not always by pure choice, but often because structural supports like paid family leave and affordable childcare are inadequate or absent. These interruptions compound over time: less experience accumulates, promotions are delayed, and the compounding effect of lower early wages means smaller lifetime earnings even after returning to full-time work.

Abele’s dual-impact model frames this not as individual failure but as the predictable result of two interacting forces. The longitudinal research testing the model found that 65 percent of the variance in women’s career success could be explained by factors including self-concept, parenthood timing, and work hours – compared to 33 percent for men. Women’s career outcomes are more tightly constrained by these gendered variables than men’s are. Men’s career success was essentially independent of whether they became parents at all.

This is precisely what a dual-impact framework predicts: because women are subject to both stronger communal self-concepts (inside perspective) and stronger social pressures around caregiving (outside perspective), the compounding effect on their careers is larger. The gap in outcomes is not the result of a single cause but of multiple reinforcing pressures that operate simultaneously across the lifespan.

Why this model still matters 🔗

Abele’s dual-impact model remains valuable because it resists oversimplification. It does not attribute career disparities solely to personal preference, nor does it reduce everything to structural discrimination. Instead, it holds both in view: individual self-concepts matter, and so do social expectations. They interact, and that interaction produces patterns that are visible in data on wages, occupational distribution, and career success decades after a person’s first career-related choices are made.

Understanding the model also points toward where interventions can be most effective. Changing only social structures without addressing the internalized self-concepts that guide individual decisions will produce limited change. Equally, encouraging individuals to think more “ambitiously” about careers without changing the structural barriers they face – inadequate parental leave, inflexible workplaces, biased performance evaluations – will also fall short. Progress on gender equity in careers requires addressing both the inside and the outside simultaneously.

Data from Washington Center for Equitable Growth show that while occupational gender segregation has declined since 2003, many sectors remain heavily male- or female-dominated. The wage consequences of that remaining segregation continue to be substantial. At the current rate of change, projections suggest that full pay equity between women and men working full-time, year-round will not be reached until 2066 – and for all workers including part-time, not until 2088.

That pace reflects how deeply embedded both the inside and outside forces described by Abele’s model remain. Career choices are never made in a vacuum. They are made by individuals who carry gendered self-concepts formed over years of socialization, in environments that continue to reward and penalize people differently based on their gender. The dual-impact model names both of those realities – and in doing so, gives researchers, policymakers, and individuals a clearer map of what actually needs to change.

What do you think? If both self-concept and societal expectations shape career choices, which of the two do you believe is harder to change – and why? And to what extent do you think structural reforms like paid family leave can shift the internalized gender beliefs that also drive career decisions?

References

1. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781410605245-21/dual-impact-model-gender-career-related-processes-andrea-abele
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14. https://equitablegrowth.org/u-s-labor-market-data-reveal-that-different-job-characteristics-contribute-to-the-gender-wage-gap/