At first glance, high school students seem to be confident in themselves in 2022. According to a new Ifop poll for the Delta Business School, 75% of high school students say they have self-confidence. Nevertheless, on closer inspection, boys seem to be more confident than girls at this age: 28% of boys say they are completely confident compared to only 14% of them. To Conversely, 10% of high school girls say they have no self-confidence at all, compared to 1% of boys of the same age.
the social determinism also plays a role in self-confidence, since 50% of high school students from wealthy categories say they have self-confidence in the school environment, compared to 11% in the modest categories.
Despite these differences in self-confidence, girls in high school seem to be slightly more numerous than boys (71% against 62%) to be sure of continuing their studies after high school, in particular because they have better academic results. However, disparities remain in the choice of orientation in higher education: girls are more likely to go into “care” professions (19% go into the health sector compared to 6% of boys) at the expense of more remunerative professions (2% against 18% of boys).
Ambition, a less and less gendered notion
If 75% of the young girls questioned continue to think thatbeing a woman is a “penalizing factor” in the world of work, however, they have more and more ambition in their professional lives. Long presented as masculine, ambition is less and less gendered: high school students declare almost similar levels of ambition (87% for high school students against 82% for high school girls). Additionally, a large majority of all high school students (68%) say that both men and women have equal ambition.
“Less confident in high school, women will tend, as other surveys show, to seek fewer raises, to self-censor and to hit a glass ceiling in their careers. The young girls surveyed are fully aware of these issues when more than 8 out of 10 say that they want to be respected in their professional life and find in it the confidence and recognition of skills that they do not grant themselves not always”says Louise Jussian, senior researcher at the gender, sexuality and sexual health center of Ifop.
If many high school students today recognize themselves in this notion of ambition, in particular thanks to the image of the self made man or of the business woman on social networks, it remains in particular the prerogative of the oldest high school students at first and of good, even very good students. 46% of very good students are indeed very ambitious, compared to only 5% of bad students.
What is the ambition of high school students today? According to Ifop, today’s high school students want to take control of their lives by doing work that they enjoy and that makes sense to them, while being able to organize their time. The image of the entrepreneur seems to better meet their expectations with regard to work than salaried employment and 70% of them see themselves capable of creating their own business one day and 86% think of doing so.
“More generally, high school students share the aspirations widely expressed today by young employees: above all to do a job that you love and that makes sense.concludes Louise Jussian.
Source :
- Ifop study for Delta Business School carried out by self-administered online questionnaire from November 22 to 30, 2022 from a representative national sample of 1,006 high school students, representative of the high school student population.
