Gendered Intergenerational Occupational Transmission Across the Status Hierarchy: Evidence from High School and Beyond

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 3. Inequality and the Labor Market

Abstract

Gender inequality in occupational mobility has been historically understudied, in part because women’s average labor force participation was much lower than men’s in earlier cohorts. However, women’s labor market attachment has strengthened appreciably over time. Focusing on a cohort in the prime of their labor market years, we compare patterns of intergenerational occupational mobility for men and women, exploring (1) how they may vary across the status hierarchy and (2) the extent to which academic performance, educational attainment, and occupational aspirations explain the gender differences in intergenerational occupational transmission. Drawing on data from High School and Beyond:1980 (N ≈ 13,980), we use quantile regression to estimate associations between parental status when sample members were in high school and individual occupational status at ~56–58 years of age at the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles of the distribution of occupational standing. We also incorporate interaction between parental status and gender and sequentially adjust for sociodemographic background, academic performance, educational attainment, and occupational aspirations. We distinguish between absolute mobility and relative mobility, measured by Nakao-Treas Prestige Scores and occupational percentile ranks, respectively. Results show that gender differences in absolute mobility appear primarily at the top of the distribution, with men benefiting more than women from parental prestige. Regarding relative mobility, intergenerational transmission in percentile ranks at the bottom is stronger for women; at the median, it is stronger for men; and at the top, transmission is similar for both genders. Academic performance and educational attainment largely account for the gender gap in absolute mobility at the top, whereas in relative mobility transmission persists for women but not men at the bottom and remains significant—though attenuated and weaker for women—at the median. Together, this study shows how gendered occupational mobility varies across the occupational distribution and by how status is measured.

Authors

• Yue Qin, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Eric Grodsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Chandra Muller, University of Texas-Austin

• Rob Warren, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities