Debates about the future of care work tend to begin with the workers we already have. We ask about burnout and attrition among nurses, teachers and even physicians, who who will care for aging populations, and why so much essential care work remains poorly paid. Much less attention is given to an earlier point in the process: which young people imagine themselves doing care work in the first place?

This question matters because ideas about occupational futures begin forming well before people enter the labour market. At age 15, young people already have quite differentiated ideas about the kinds of work they expect to do. These expectations are not firm predictions of their eventual occupations, but they are not simply fantasies either. They reflect what young people regard as desirable and realistically attainable within the social worlds they know.

Data from large international surveys indicate that planning to pursue a career in caring fields is surprisingly popular, especially for young women, in the US and in most other countries around the world. The catch is that the care-work goals young women have in mind are in carework professions, and not the low-paid carework fields that require fewer formal credentials. 

In our 2025 Socius article, Planning to Care: The United States in Comparative Perspective, 2000 to 2022, we used five waves of OECD PISA data to examine expectations of entering care work among more than one million 15-year-olds in the United States and 29 other OECD countries. The results reinforce a familiar theme—the persistence of gendered care expectations—while challenging the assumption that future care shortages reflect a general lack of young people willing to enter caring careers.

Carework is a popular choice among young women

In 2000, 51 per cent of American girls expected to work in a care-related occupation at age 30, compared with 15 per cent of boys. In 2022, the figures were almost unchanged: 50 per cent of girls and 14 per cent of boys. Thus, despite many efforts to open up a wider set of career options for young women, including jobs in STEM fields, technology and finance, young women continue to gravitate toward carework fields. And notwithstanding major changes in women’s education and employment, the gender gap in teenagers’ care-related career expectations has barely moved.

This matters because occupational segregation does not suddenly appear when employers make hiring decisions. It is already visible much earlier, in young people’s understandings of where women and men belong. If very few boys imagine themselves in caring occupations at 15, the scope for substantially changing the gender composition of these fields later is already constrained.

But “care work” conceals very different careers

Care work is not a single destination.

Healthcare, teaching, social work, childcare and personal care may all involve caring for others, but young people do not value them equally.

Among American teenagers, interest in healthcare increased substantially between 2000 and 2018, before declining in the PISA survey conducted after the COVID-19 pandemic. Teaching moved in the opposite direction. Interest in education-related careers declined steadily over the period.

The US pattern was not unique: across the OECD, girls’ interest generally shifted towards healthcare and away from teaching, although the scale and timing of these changes varied across countries.

This divergence is easy to obscure when researchers or policymakers speak broadly about a “care workforce.” From the perspective of teenagers choosing future careers, becoming a physician or nurse, becoming a teacher, and becoming a home health aide are very different propositions.

Young people are interested in care—but selectively

This reveals a striking hierarchy within care work: young people are not turning away from caring careers, but they overwhelmingly favour their credentialed, professional forms.

There is no general shortage of young people expecting to enter care work in the United States. Indeed, many more teenagers expect professional care careers than could ultimately find jobs in them. Among American girls in 2022, for example, around half expected a care-related occupation, compared with less than one quarter of women currently employed in care occupations.

The mismatch lies within care work itself. Medical and other professional care occupations attract substantial interest. Nonprofessional care work—jobs that often involve intensive direct caring but require fewer formal credentials and frequently offer lower pay, less security, and poorer working conditions—attracts very little interest.

These are also the jobs societies often struggle to fill and retain. The problem, therefore, may not be that younger generations have stopped valuing caring careers. Rather, the forms of care they imagine themselves providing are strongly stratified by status, credentials and working conditions.

Teenagers, like adults, understand occupational hierarchies.

Gender matters most—but parents matter too

We also examined whether adolescents expecting care careers came from particularly advantaged families or were especially high academic performers.

These characteristics explained surprisingly little. Gender mattered far more than socioeconomic background or academic achievement.

Parental occupations also mattered. In the United States, we found a particularly clear same-gender pattern: daughters were more likely to expect care work when their mothers worked in similar occupations, while fathers’ occupations were especially influential for sons. Across the 29 OECD comparison countries, parental role modelling was also evident, although among girls the influence of mothers and fathers was more similar.

This is another reminder that occupational expectations emerge within social environments. Young people encounter occupations through their families, schools, communities and media, and these encounters help establish ideas about what kinds of work are appropriate, attainable or attractive for “people like me.”

Looking beyond the United States

Our newly published article in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Care Work Career Plans in 30 OECD Countries, 2000–2022, examines differences among 30 OECD countries.

Countries differ markedly in teenagers’ interest in care careers. In 2022, the share of girls expecting a care career ranged from roughly one-third in Korea, Sweden, Hungary and Latvia to about one-half in Chile, Canada, Australia, the United States and Switzerland; gender gaps ranged from about 15 percentage points in Korea to nearly 40 in Finland.

Despite these important differences, many international similarities are evident. 

Across the OECD, girls’ interest generally shifted towards healthcare and away from teaching, although the scale and timing of these changes varied across countries. Across the 29 OECD comparison countries, parental role modelling was also evident.

Taken together, the two studies suggest that future care shortages are not one problem but several, and that we need to distinguish at least three questions.

Do young people see care work as part of their future at all? Which forms of care do they regard as worthwhile careers? And who imagines that these occupations are for people like them?

The answers differ substantially depending on whether we are talking about healthcare, teaching, or lower-paid support care.

Recruiting the next generation of care workers, then, is not simply a matter of persuading more teenagers that ‘care matters.’ Many already see attractive futures in particular caring professions. The harder challenge is to understand—and change—why other socially indispensable forms of care remain largely outside their imagined occupational futures, and why those futures remain so strongly divided by gender.

Without improving pay, working conditions and promotion opportunities, recruiting sufficient care workers for non-professional caring positions will remain a challenge. 

Joanna Sikora is Associate Professor of Sociology at Australian National University. Jerry A. Jacobs is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania

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