ABSTRACT
Feminist research over the past two decades has clearly demonstrated the significance of gender to the study and interpretation of social class stratification and social class mobility (Dex 1987; Marshall et al. 1988; Abbott and Sapsford 1987; Payne and Abbott 1990). At any one time, women and men display distinct patterns in terms of their distribution across the social class hierarchy, whilst over the course of individual lifetimes women and men tend to experience quite different patterns of movement between social classes. ‘Snapshots’ of the gendered composition of the class hierarchy reveal that women are disproportionately concentrated in semi-professional, clerical and semi-/unskilled manual work, whilst men have far greater presence in the professions, skilled manual occupations, and occupy senior managerial sections of the service class almost exclusively. Part of the explanation for this is that men are far more likely than women to experience upward social mobility during the course of their working lives, especially into the service class. Upward social mobility is less common for women. Even where this does take place, movements are frequently rather limited (Abbott 1990; Chapman 1990; Dex 1990), rather than the longer-range movements between social classes more typically experienced by men (Goldthorpe, Llewellyn and Payne 1980). More commonly, women experience downward mobility over their life course, with a great majority leaving the labour market at the end of their working lives from jobs of lower status and income than those they held as young adults.
