Facebook Found a Way to Determine if Your Parents’ Career Choices Influenced Your Own

When it became time to decide what career path we wanted to explore, how much of our decision was based solely on what our parents did for a living?

In order to understand the factors that may have influenced our career choices, Facebook data scientists Ismail Onur Filiz and Lada Adamic analyzed 5.6 million parent-child relationships in the English-speaking Facebook world to identify some notable trends.

The pair examined the listed occupations on users’ Facebook pages and were able to calculate the probability of a child selecting an occupation based on what their parents did for a living. They then mapped the major occupation categories depending on the listed options.

For example, if you’re a male and your father works in the legal profession, you’ll be 4.6 times as likely to pursue a career in medicine than the average person. Or if you’re a female whose mother is a nurse, you’re 3.75 times more likely to follow in her footsteps.

Image: Facebook

Image: Facebook

Image: Facebook

Image: Facebook

The research also saw “substantial cross-gender occupation inheritance,” where scientist fathers saw scientist daughters at 3.9 times the overall rate and mothers working in law had sons who pursued a legal profession at 6.6 times the overall rate.

The research concluded that people within a close-knit family were more likely to choose the same occupation as their parents, which was also true with twins who are more likely to be raised in a similar environment and receive similar parenting methods.

Overall, the majority of those studied followed their own path and decided on a profession that was different from their parents and siblings. So for anyone that tries to say millennials don’t march to the beat of their own drum, you are incorrect.

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