High-status Employment among Women – A Longitudinal Study of the Role of Childhood Occupational Preferences

• In Event: 127 - Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Paper Session: Table 12. Occupations and Inequality

Abstract

Daughters of the 1950s “housewife” generations have entered professional occupations at unprecedented numbers although their occupational preferences were formed in relation to a highly gender-segregated labour market. In this paper, I investigate the relation between childhood occupational preferences and adult occupational attainment in a Swedish 1950s cohort. The question is if childhood openness to male-dominated occupations was related to high-status adult occupational attainment, beyond the influence of childhood status preferences? The investigation includes 4,993 women whose occupational preferences were surveyed in 1966, at age 13, and whose adult occupational attainment was followed-up in 1990. In their childhood, female labour force participation was low and high-status female-dominated occupations were lacking. In the 1960s and 1970s, several policy reforms took place, reducing gender differences in education and introducing individual taxation. At the same time, female labour force participation and demand for female labour in the welfare services sector increased. My results show that acceptance of male-dominated occupations in childhood was positively related to adult high-status occupational attainment, even beyond the influence of childhood occupational status preferences and family socio-economic position. I argue that females who were more willing to accept male-dominated occupations in childhood may have been more set to benefit from educational reforms and meritocratic organizational and legal practices in their career-making. Women who were unwilling to accept male-dominated occupations may instead have compromised with their status preferences, and turned to other, equally or more satisfying, gender-typical careers that were abundant thanks to the concurrent expansion of public sector welfare services.

Author

• Cecilia von Otter, Stockholm University