Inherited Aspirations: A Genealogical Reading of Gendered Career Interests Among Students at a South African University of Technology

Abstract

Career choice is ordinarily studied as a decision. This article treats it as an inheritance. Drawing on survey data from 369 students at a South African university of technology, it examines gender and locality differences in career interests, world-of-work awareness, career adaptability, and perceptions of complying with employer competency expectations, and reads those differences through African gender scholarship and ritual theory, using genealogy as an interpretive framework rather than as a method. Mann–Whitney U tests showed that male students scored significantly higher than female students on specialised creativity and problem-solving, general managerial autonomy, entrepreneurship, overall career interests, business and entrepreneurial skills, and overall employer competency expectations, with small practical effects (d = 0.23 to 0.33). Students from rural areas scored higher than urban students on job and occupation fitness and on the perceived contribution of their studies to work-world awareness. This article argues that the gendered gaps cluster within a single domain, that of proprietary and directive authority, and that this clustering may be read as the statistical residue of ritual and institutional processes through which public authority was progressively masculinised. Small effects are consistent with an ordering that is socially maintained rather than dispositionally fixed, although this study did not measure ritual participation or cultural transmission directly, and the reading offered here is interpretive. Implications are drawn for a career-guidance framework that engages cultural formation directly instead of routing around it.