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More women are now entering male-dominated fields, yet, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) remain dominated by men. We examined the association between boys' and girls' STEM choices after secondary education and friends' gender norms, and whether pressure to conform to traditional gender norms differs depending on the gender composition of the friend group. Drawing on 3 waves of longitudinal data (N = 744) from the Netherlands, our sample consists of adolescents in STEM trajectories in secondary education. Their retention in STEM after secondary education gives us a better understanding of gender-specific "leakage" from the STEM pipeline. We found that girls' likelihood of choosing STEM decreased drastically when friends had more traditional gender norms. Friends with traditional gender norms had less effect on boys. Nonetheless, boys with only same-sex friends were more likely to enter STEM. Our findings indicate that an environment with gender-normative ideas pushes girls out of the STEM pipeline.

The study explores how parents' occupational field affects gender differences in educational fields. On the one hand, the theory of direct transfer predicts that adolescents enter fields similar to those of their parents because of intergenerational transmission of occupation-specific resources and that adolescents are more likely to draw upon the resources provided by the higher-status parent. On the other hand, the theory of sex-role learning predicts that boys and girls are more likely to choose more gender-stereotypical fields of study because they learn 'appropriate' gender-role behaviour from their parents' occupational field and that boys are more likely to learn this behaviour from their father and girls from their mother. We use longitudinal data collected from adolescents and their parents in the Netherlands (N = 2,497) and tested our hypotheses using multiple-group structural equation modelling and multinomial regression analyses. In line with sex-role learning, results show that especially mothers who are employed in a more feminine occupational field influence their daughters to enter a more feminine field of study (health, biology, agriculture and veterinary) and their sons to enter a more masculine field of study (science and technology). Mothers' occupational field therefore not only influences girls' field of study, but also boys'. This study highlights the role of horizontal characteristics when examining which field of study adolescents enter. Contrary to the stratification literature, which primarily focuses on fathers, this study concludes that mothers play a more important role in gender differences in fields of study.Keywords: parents' occupational field; field of study; gender differences This research was supported by the Dutch Scientific Organisation (NWO) research talent grant entitled 'Gendered Choices: school and field of study trajectories of male and female adolescents in four European countries' [grant number 406-12-018]. Additionally, financial support from the NORFACE research programme on Migration in Europe -Social, Economic, Cultural and Policy Dynamics and from "NWO middelgroot" [480-11-013] is acknowledged. *Corresponding author. Department of Sociology/ICS, Radboud University Nijmegen, Thomas van Aquinostraat 6, 6525 GD Nijmegen, The Netherlands. E-mail: m.vandervleuten@maw.ru.nl. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.British Educational Research Journal Vol. 44, No. 2, April 2018, pp. 294-318 DOI: 10.1002 Introduction Boys and girls are still segregated into different occupational fields, partly owing to persistent gender differences in fields of study. Boys are more likely to enter gender-stereotypical masculine fields of study such as engineering and mathematics, whereas girls are more likely to enter gender-stereotypical feminine fields such as the hum...

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