ABSTRACT
Women’s lifetime occupational mobility is significant for a number of reasons. Two main areas of importance are considered in this paper, labour market theories and class analysis based, on social mobility studies. Both of these sets of theories have been obliged to evaluate women’s place, partly in the light of their increased labour market participation, but also in response to feminist criticisms. As far as labour market theories are concerned, women and gender divisions have been incorporated only into segmented labour market theories, and then in ways which are not entirely satisfactory. Also, a better conceptualization of women’s place within segmented labour market theories has been lacking lifetime occupational mobility data for women (and for men), which is a necessary basis on which appropriate sectors and their interrelationships could be mapped out. To the extent that social mobility analyses provide a foundation for class analysis, mobility over a lifetime is also an important aspect of the discussion. Women’s employment and occupational mobility have been used by some to justify ignoring their class position (if they are married) (e.g. Goldthorpe, 1983). However, it is this author’s view that an understanding of women’s lifetime and life-cycle mobility is a necessary foundation for the conceptual developments which are required to understand women’s place in class analysis, a view elaborated elsewhere (Dex, 1990). As Payne (1987a, b) has argued convincingly, labour market and social class analyses are two aspects of the same sociological interest. Thus, the way individuals are allocated to certain occupations and move within and between them is the subject matter of labour market theories, but clearly, these same mechanisms must to a large extent underlie social mobility and class analyses.
