The Impact of Career Choice on the Implicit Gender–Career Bias Among Undergraduate Brazilian Students

Gender stereotypes affect both women and men from childhood. Whereas men may be more often associated with STEM careers, women tend to be associated with nurturing and caring careers. The present research used an explicit scale and the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure to investigate how gender–career relational patterns could vary for Brazilian college students according to their gender and career. Both instruments included the names of careers stereotypically regarded as “male” or “female” and words indicating gender. Participants were divided into four groups (men and women in STEM and the humanities). A significant pro-male–STEM bias emerged for all groups, except the STEM-female group, the only group to show a significant pro-female-STEM bias (p < .05) and a significant difference from the other three groups. A significant implicit pro-men–male career bias was mostly more substantial among male students. In the explicit scales, participants tended to show a more neutral evaluation (not classifying careers as “male” or “female”). Correlations were found between explicit evaluations for male careers and the implicit trial type “women–male careers,” indicating that the more a career was explicitly evaluated as male, the more easily it was related with “women” as false at the implicit level.