Facebook studied 5.6 million people to see if family influences careers

Facebook’s research arm published an interesting study last week that looked at 5.6 million anonymous Facebook accounts to see if it could find a correlation between family and your future career.

The study first looked at father-son occupations and mother-daughter occupations, which found that varied depending on what occupation was being discussed.

For example, the company found that a father in the legal profession is 4.6 times more likely to have a son that practices medicine.

Another part of the study looked at connections through a network visualization, and found that while 20 percent of mothers who worked in office or administrative services had daughters that chose the same career, it was only 2 times the normal rate.

Because of that, Facebook’s researchers say that “even though relatively speaking, a child may be much more likely to follow in his or her parents’ footsteps, the absolute percentage may still be quite low.”

Researchers also looked at whether siblings shared the same career and found that on average 15 percent do, which is higher than the average of any two “same gender, same age individuals” which is just 8.6 percent.

Strikingly, twins are even more likely to choose the same occupation at 24.7 percent, which surprised the researchers. Facebook’s post contains interactive charts and further research so you can dig into how specific occupations relate to each other.

Overall, Facebook’s study found that people are more likely to “eventually” choose the same occupation, but overall the “vast majority” of children choose their own career that’s different from their parents.

Feel better now?

➤ Do jobs run in families? [Facebook Research]