Editing Role model (section)

== Effect on career opportunity and choice ==

According to historian Pamela  Laird, a person's chosen role models may have a considerable impact on his or her career opportunities and choices. The suitability of a role model depends, in part, on the admirer's perceived commonality with the model, who should provide an image of an ambitious yet realistic goal. For example, Laird suggests that, [[Benjamin Franklin]] served as the role model for countless nineteenth-century white businessmen, including notables such as [[Thomas Mellon]], [[Benjamin Goodrich|B.F. Goodrich]], and [[Friedrich Weyerhäuser|Frederick Weyerhäuser]]. Laird suggests that the lack of commonalities between potential role models and would-be admirers helped perpetuate barriers to American minorities and women as they tried to advance in a business world dominated by white men, thus spurring late twentieth-century efforts to develop suitable role models for these groups.<ref name="Laird, Pamela Walker"/>

Parent role models also significantly influence a person's "education and training aspirations, task [[self-efficacy]], and expectancy for an entrepreneurial career".<ref>Robert F. Scherer, et al. "Role Model Performance Effects on Development of Entrepreneurial Career Preference." Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice 13.3 (1989): 53-71.</ref>