Beyond Access in Social Mobility Research: Investigating the Class Ceiling

• In Event: 528 - Regular Session. The Limits of Intergenerational Mobility and the Power of Social Reproduction

Abstract

In this paper we use the newly released UK Labour Force Survey social origin data to compare rates of social mobility into different elite occupations. We find a distinction between ‘traditional’ professions, such as law, medicine and finance, which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals, and technical or emerging high-status occupations, particularly those related to IT, that appear to recruit more widely. Second, we find that even when the upwardly mobile are successful in entering elite occupations also find that the mobile tend to have considerably lower income than those from privileged backgrounds. Investigating this further we demonstrate that even when controlling for important variables such as education, location, age, and gender, the upwardly mobile have considerably lower incomes than their higher-origin colleagues. These findings underline the value of analyses of mobility into high-status occupations as well as illustrating how, beyond entry, the mobile often face considerable disadvantage within occupations, and point to the possibility of a ‘class ceiling’ of class-based discrimination akin to the ‘glass ceiling’ faced by women.

Authors

• Daniel Laurison, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Sam Friedman, London School of Economics and Political Science