The Social Mobility Of Women

Beyond Male Mobility Models

Geoff Payne, Pamela Abbott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135386276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First Published in 1990. What are a woman's chances of 'getting on in life'? How many shopkeepers' daughters make it to senior politcal pots- more or less, than shopkeeper's sons? What do we mean when we talk of a 'successful woman'? Up until now, we have know very little about female social mobility as studies have mostly been concerned with men. For the first time, this collection presents a compressive account for women's social mobility, built up by exploring how family background, work career and experience of marriage connect into a mobility profile. Starting from conventional questions, such as, what are the rates of inter-generational mobility, how do qualifications shape entry to work, and how does first job relate to later career achievement, the chapters begin to modify the perspective inherited from male mobility models. Is marriage in itself a form of mobility, and if so in which direction? What is the effect of child-rearing on careers? And how do household arrangements modify both occupational participation and the class position of married woman? Our models of the British class structure become increasingly open to question when tested against female mobility experiences. Based in the new tradition of mobility studies, which is now concerned as much with employment as with class in a narrow sense, this study offers a fresh perspective on the idea of social mobility itself. Its conclusions and proposals for new ways of seeing mobility, for example as a person-based profile, are equally relevant to students of social stratification, social structure and socio-economic change, as well as those who seek to understand the place of women in society today.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Origins and Destinations

Geoff Payne and Pamela Abbott

This book will probably attract three main types of reader. One kind will consist of feminists, who are primarily interested in learning more about women’s lives, in this case about women’s opportunities—or lack of opportunities—for occupational achievement and movement between social classes. For this readership, the significance of the book will be its attempt to provide the first comprehensible description of female social mobility. A second, smaller audience will be those sociologists with a specialist knowledge of the sociology of social class and mobility. In a sense, they will be the reverse of the first audience, because their interest will be in mobility itself, here reported almost coincidentally about women. They will find, none the less, that conventional frameworks for mobility analysis are sharply tested when they are applied to female experiences. Our third readership will be drawn from the broader constituency of sociology and social science in general, with an equal curiosity about both women and social mobility. This group is likely to have less detailed background knowledge about these topics than the first two audiences do about one or the other subject.

In putting together this collection, we therefore had to take into account the levels of prior knowledge that each of the three types of reader would have. We hope that all three readerships will find something to satisfy them, not only because of the intrinsic interest and importance of female social mobility, but also because we have tried to select a range of treatments and topics from the introductory to the more advanced. Inevitably, those with a specialist background will find some parts a little basic, while others may feel at times unsure of the assumptions, terminology and cross-references.

The papers chosen do, on the whole, keep technicalities to a minimum. The processes used to explore and reveal patterns of mobility are carefully explained. If anyone is new to the field of social mobility, they may find it useful to look at a short, non-technical introduction to the subject (Payne, 1989a), or at more length, Heath (1981). Of course, as a cursory glance ahead will show, there are still plenty of tables and arguments built on a variety of measures. The less numerically-inclined should not be put off, however, because they will find key conclusions restated in the narrative (so that they can always resort to the time-honoured practice of skipping over some of the numerical detail!). The outcome is likely to be worthwhile, because the picture of the social mobility of women that emerges is a fascinating one.

Women and Mobility

This could hardly be otherwise, because mobility is such a central process in modern society. We have already learned a great deal from its study, both about people’s life chances, and about the underlying structures of our society. When we compare the social circumstances of a person’s early life with the social and occupational positions that are currently held, we see how, in everyday parlance, that person has ‘got on in life’. When we examine career paths through education, first job, and subsequent employment, we discover routes, blockages, successes and failures which are patterned and systematic. They therefore need to be understood as shared experiences and as the outcome of social processes, as well as of individual talents and achievements. Social mobility combines the study of paid employment, labour markets, occupational change—work in general— with the analysis of structured inequalities and social classes. Not only is social mobility a central topic in sociology as a subject, it is also a topic that lies at the heart of our experience of our own lives.

It is not surprising, then, that when feminist sociologists began to draw attention to the invisibility of women in most sociological studies, they identified social mobility as one of the key areas of shortcoming. Indeed, if one re-examines the previous paragraph and masculinizes its terminology, one would have a more accurate statement of the contribution of social mobility to our knowledge, from the end of the Second World War through to the start of the last decade. However, it would equally be wrong to claim that we know nothing about female mobility, or to reject everything we know about mobility from the study of men, just because it is incomplete.

For a start, as this collection demonstrates, there has been research into the social mobility of women. It is true that much of it has not been published, or received the attention that it arguably deserves. When it is drawn together, on the other hand, it presents a surprisingly extensive set of information which at the very least outlines the basic patterns of contemporary female mobility. The apparent absence of women from mobility analysis can be largely attributed to their absence from the main published reports of three of the four most extensive empirical studies of social mobility in this country (Glass, 1954; Goldthorpe, 1980; Payne, 1987a and the exception, Marshall et al., 1988). There is little point regretting that past opportunities were missed: until such time as a new major study can be implemented, we must make the most of the results that we already have. At times, the discussion of these results will be frustrated by gaps in our knowledge, limitations to the data, and inadequacy of conceptual frameworks that were developed to handle the mobility of men. But the study of male mobility is to a large extent also bedevilled by many of these same problems, and the number of substantial studies of men has also been very small (Payne, 1989b).

Two things follow from this observation. If our knowledge base is restricted, and likely for the time being to remain so, it would be as well to maximize usage of the knowledge we do have. This will include concepts and data relating to male mobility. Second, given the contestation over concepts, measures and perspectives, there are advantages in starting with current debates. Many of the operationalizations and questions in the following chapters are borrowed from previous literature on male mobility, although often with the ultimate intention of turning them back on themselves by showing how uneasily they contain the female dimension.

The view of mobility analysis that lies behind this collection of papers is that mobility cannot be fully comprehended as solely a male, or solely a female, process. At this stage of our understanding, and typically for ease of exposition, one may need to talk about one or the other: the goal to which we are working is to account for the interaction of the two. This applies equally well to the two main schools of thought in current mobility research (Payne, 1990). The more traditional position, exemplified by John Goldthorpe, sees mobility as movement between social classes, and of interest because of the way it may modify class behaviour. However, even if the class behaviour of married women does resemble that of their husbands, there is still the question of why this should be so. An answer cannot be provided without looking at both men and women, and their interaction through mate-selection, class endogamy, and subsequent household roles. It is not sufficient to point to evidence of similarities between marital partners as a reason for continued concentration on the male half of the population.

The case can be put more starkly for the alternative perspective, to be found for example in the work of the Scottish Mobility Study. This approach stresses that mobility is measured between groupings based on occupational categories, and that mobility has therefore to be understood as an outcome of labour market processes. As men and women are at least notionally in competition with each other for the same jobs, it follows from this view that occupational mobility must take account of all players in the labour market. The fact that labour markets are predominantly gender-segregated creates different mobility chances for men and women: their relative chances are dependent upon the nature of that segregation. The mobility of each gender depends on the totality of the labour market.

It follows that a new female mobility analysis without a comparable male analysis would be little improvement on what we already have. At our present stage of development, the understanding of the interactions between the two mobilities is rudimentary. The exposition of a social mobility of women is a necessary step towards the destination of an integrated explanation.

Approaches to Mobility

The prime task of this collection is then to present for the first time a representative picture of female social mobility in Britain, and to connect this to our knowledge of male mobility. Such a picture naturally reflects the sociological perspectives of the editors and the contributors with whom they have collaborated. Not all writings can be included (although most are, we believe, reported and discussed below): for example Goldthorpe and Payne’s 1986 article is sufficiently familiar not to require republication, while the key findings of the Essex Class Study are discussed in Chapter 12. Equally, the competing paradigms for mobility analysis do not receive even-handed treatment. The most important case of this is that patterns of social mobility for both women and men are seen by the editors as owing more to occupational processes than to class processes. The term ‘class mobility’, employed extensively by the Nuffield team, is not one that is normally used here. Instead, mobility is more frequently called ‘occupational mobility’, and seen as movements between occupational groupings which may or may not be social classes, and may or may not be related to other aspects of class analysis. This is not to replace ‘mobility’ with the idea of ‘career’, but rather to leave open the question of exactly how movements in the occupational dimension relate to movements in the class dimension. Origins and destinations are not just jobs, but complex social positions that have coherence and are differently placed in the competition for resources and power. These social positions may be occupational classes, but they are not necessarily social classes in the wider sense (see Crompton, 1989). Mobility’s contribution to class structuration must as yet be seen as more problematic than Giddens (1973) or Parkin (1972) have assumed.

It follows from this view of mobility as an occupational process that the most appropriate unit of analysis for present purposes is taken to be the individual, and not the household (see Abbott and Sapsford, 1987, for a discussion of the alternatives). To be more specific, a woman’s class position and her occupational identity are best given by her own current or most recent paid employment. This applies to both single and married women. The choice of ‘own occupation’ is not without its drawbacks, as Chapter 2 explains, but for the purposes of analyzing mobility when the latter is conceived of as primarily occupational, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. This approach runs through all of the chapters, although as Abbott and Payne observe in their chapter, the question of what is a women’s social class is a central one. The difficulty in resolving it has been a major reason for omitting women from earlier studies of social mobility.

In saying that the unit of mobility analysis is the individual, the focus of attention is on movement and destination. The origin from which the person moves is on the other hand in most cases taken as a household identity (at least when one talks about intergenerational mobility). Origin positions for both men and women are normally defined by the occupational class of the head of household when the respondent was aged 14. The head of the household is most commonly male, although both the Nuffield and Aberdeen studies recorded a female household head when there was no male ‘breadwinner’. The more recent Essex Class Study used ‘Chief Childhood Supporter’ in an effort to restrict any gender bias.

The obvious limitation of such an operationalization is that the influence of the mother is usually disregarded. As Robert Miller and Bernadette Hayes show in Chapter 6, this is to restrict our understanding of parental influences. The Irish Mobility Study data reveal that the mother’s occupation and her education affect the offspring’s occupational achievement, most notably in the case of daughters. Unfortunately, the other data-sets have restricted information on these subjects. In the past, it could be argued that few women worked after marriage, and few had post-elementary education. In today’s world, this sharp distinction and minority status have been replaced by universal secondary schooling and greatly extended labour market participation (some consequences of which are discussed by Shirley Dex in Chapter 10). The new picture is likely to be more complicated, and worthy of more extended treatment.

This brief statement of the individual/household unit question serves to show how the two elements of mobility—origin and destination—contain a distinctive female dimension. We cannot fully explain the mobility of one generation without the inclusion of both parents from the previous generation. And we cannot claim to have described mobility in the present generation without including the half of the population who are women.

A Basic Picture of Mobility

The collection is organized around the idea that there are a series of basic markers of mobility, for which evidence about men is generally known whereas it is not so for women. As the book develops, this is broadened to address features of female mobility that can be less well contained in a framework that was developed for the more limited task of conceptualizing male mobility. This latter theme follows the conventional life-course events of early career, marriage and re-entry to the labour market. The collection is ‘top and tailed’ by two editorial chapters setting the context, and drawing conclusions for mobility analysis from the core chapters.

In Chapter 2, the editors reflect on the conventional wisdom that women have been left out of mobility research, exploring some reasons for this, and some of the consequences of the omission for the way mobility has been conceived. Central to this is the narrowness of definitions and the restricted focus on class, with its attendant problems for locating women in a system of social stratification. As a consideration of gender and labour markets, and the changing roles played by women in society show, the basic experience of mobility must on average and in detail be different from men. The distinctive employment patterns mean that routes and opportunities are also gender specific, so that they require study in their own right. This view contrasts with that of Goldthorpe, who has argued that the mobility regime for both genders is essentially the same in class terms, once allowance for occupational differences has been made. Building on data from the Essex and Aberdeen Studies, the authors show how the work situations, concentrated in certain occupational classes, give a character to mobility that depends on the rules of access to employment. This character, in terms of rewards, autonomy and power at work, provides a bridge to class experiences, and to the typical self-experiences of women as under-esteemed. It thus connects both to class analysis and to the direct concrete experiences of women in contemporary Britain.

In what is the first systematic analysis of the data on women from the Scottish Mobility Study, Tony Chapman shows how occupational distributions amd mobility experience are connected (Chapter 3). At one level, this can be read as a series of basic statements about overall mobility, inflow rates (looking at women’s present classes, and asking from which origins did they ‘flow in’) and outflow rates (looking at origins, and comparing chances of ‘flowing out’ to different destinations). Chapman is in this work providing some of the fundamental building blocks of knowledge about intergenerational female social mobility, of the kind that have for a long time been available about male mobility. Although, as he stresses, these data are drawn from the partners of the men in the study’s sample, and so cannot encompass the never-married women, his chapter provides a solid starting point for understanding the core patterns.

At a second level, however, Chapman goes beyond telling us that 32 per cent of women are upwardly mobile, compared with 42 per cent of men, or that men and women presently in the service class are recruited from broadly similar backgrounds. He shows that particular measures of mobility may contain variation in thier components: female upward mobility is concentrated into movements into semi-skilled, routine non-manual, and lower professional occupations, because these are the jobs that women rather than men do. Even if overall rates of mobility are similar, their components (and their explanations) will differ. When we include women in our data, we begin to realize how male oriented are our analytical techniques.

Chapman is asking two points here. One is about female social mobility per se, while the other is about methods of analysis inherited from the study of male mobility. Equally, more sophisticated techniques, such as manipulating the distributions of the mobility table in order to separate out ‘real’ mobility from changes in occupational structures, may not be very fruitful. Whereas in male mobility, such an adjustment is to fathers and sons, in female mobility it is to fathers and daughters. This is akin to saying that had daughters been sons, the experience of employment would have been different. It leads both to an impression that women could have been more mobile than in real life, and to exaggerating the connections between origins (the father) and actual destinations.

On the other hand, applying the basic tools of mobility analysis to data on women is a useful exercise in itself, as well as reminding us that women form a significant part of the class structure. In Chapter 4, Pamela Abbott re-examines the theses of ‘closure’, ‘buffer-zone’ and ‘counter-mobility’, which were rejected by Goldthorpe and Payne on the basis of male data. The relative absence of women among the upper segment of the service class means that parents in that class cannot guarantee to protect the class position of their female offspring. However, the same fact implies that some process of closure is operating, against women if not against would-be entrants from lower classes. Similarly, the heavy concentration of women in routine non-manual jobs creates a buffer-zone which was not evident to Goldthorpe in his study of men. The picture for countermobility is more complicated, not only because women do not have work careers in the same way as men, but because possession of educational qualifications carries more weight in female occupational achievement. Women are certainly less likely to be promoted in their work careers, so that all three theses find considerable support from the evidence on female workers.

It would be wrong, however, to give the impression that male and female experiences are totally different. As Chapter 5 shows, the differences may be more one of degree rather than kind. The examination of trends in mobility at entry to work reveals a broadly congruent picture of young men and women between 1920 and 1970, as we might expect from the historical pattern of macro-sociological changes. After all, the Depression, the Second World War, ...