“Barbie is a doctor, a lawyer, and so much more than that!”: perceiving gender inequalities is associated with higher professional aspirations

In recent years, Western societies have seen unprecedented attention to gender inequality and its repercussions for women and society as a whole. Amid this societal change, this research aims to study whether and how perceiving gender inequalities relates to women university students’ investment in study and professional aspirations. Since inequalities between women and men unfold along different domains, we considered four dimensions of inequalities: workplace inequalities, domestic unbalance, sexual harassment, and gendered social expectations. Furthermore, we examined whether achievement-related contingencies of self-worth mediated the relationship between perceiving inequalities and students’ career aspirations. Study 1, conducted in Italy (N = 418), showed that perceiving gender inequalities had both direct and indirect positive associations with women’s career aspirations. Study 2, conducted in Spain (N = 401), extended these findings by additionally considering women students’ self-reported academic effort. The key results, which align with expectations based on relative deprivation theory, suggest that perceiving systematic disadvantages for women motivates women students to invest more in their academic and professional pursuits, and this might represent an act of social change. Remarkably, domains often perceived as unrelated to the workplace, such as domestic imbalance, significantly influenced professional aspirations, emphasizing the pervasive influence of gender inequalities across multiple life contexts.