ABSTRACT
For many sociologists, the theoretical and empirical problems associated with the study of women’s class mobility have been regarded as so fundamental that few attempts have been made to study women’s occupational mobility. Social mobility research data can be used, however, to trace the occupational careers of women and men to some effect, providing that due caution is observed in the interpretation of data. It has already been noted in Chapter 3 that particular caution must be taken in the use of occupational scales because the distribution of women in the occupational structure is not the same as men’s. Women tend to be concentrated more heavily in a relatively narrow range of occupations and industries in comparison with men. It is also clear, of course, that conventional notions of life-long occupational careers as operationalized by mobility researchers does not fit well with the occupational histories of women, and married women in particular (or indeed, for all men, at all times: see Martin and Roberts, 1984; Pahl, 1984).
