The pattern of social fluidity within the British class structure: a topological model

It has previously been shown that across three British birth cohorts, relative rates of intergenerational social class mobility have remained at an essentially constant level among men and also among women who have worked only full-time. We aim now to establish the pattern of this prevailing level of social fluidity and its sources and to determine whether it too persists over time, and to bring out its implications for inequalities in relative mobility chances. We develop a parsimonious model for the log odds ratios which express the associations between individuals’ class origins and destinations. This model is derived from a topological model that comprises three kinds of readily interpretable binary characteristics and eight effects in all, each of which does, or does not, apply to particular cells of the mobility table: i.e. effects of class hierarchy, class inheritance and status affinity. Results show that the pattern as well as the level of social fluidity is essentially unchanged across the cohorts; that gender differences in this prevailing pattern are limited; and that marked differences in the degree of inequality in relative mobility chances arise with long-range transitions where inheritance effects are reinforced by hierarchy effects that are not offset by status affinity effects

Model fertility schedules revisited: The log-multiplicative model approach

This paper reconsiders Coale and Trussell's (1974) specification of model fertility schedules by age. It formally presents model fertility schedules within the framework of categorical data analysis. Specifically, births are assumed to follow an independent Poisson distribution for each age interval of each population. Identification and estimation problems are discussed. It shows that the Coale-Trussell specification corresponds to Goodman's (1979) log-multiplicative model. Following Goodman's algorithm, the paper simultaneously estimates Coale and Trussell's [upsi] (age), m, and M through an iterative maximum likelihood procedure. This is demonstrated with the same data that were used in Coale and Trussell's article. The new estimates are superior to those of Coale and Trussell according to an array of conventional goodness-of-fit criteria.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/29005/1/0000034.pd

Declining Social Mobility? Evidence from five linked Censuses in England and Wales 1971-2011

In this paper we add to the existing evidence base on recent trends in inter-generational social mobility in England and Wales. We analyse data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS-LS), which links individual records from the five decennial censuses between 1971 and 2011. The ONS-LS is an excellent data resource for the study of social mobility because it has a very large sample size, excellent population coverage and low rates of nonresponse and attrition across waves. Additionally, the structure of the study means that we can observe the occupations of LS-members' parents when they were children and follow their own progress in the labour market at regular intervals into middle age. Counter to widespread prevailing beliefs, our results show evidence of a small but significant increase in social fluidity between 1950s and the 1980s for both men and women

Some things never change: gender segregation in higher education across eight countries and three decades

This article examines the overall strength, the qualitative pattern, and the evolution over time of gender segregation in higher education across eight European countries. Although previous studies have focused primarily on the divide between humanistic and scientific fields, this work indicates that this divide accounts for no more than half of the association between gender and college major. The degree of gender imbalance is highly variable within scientific fields as well as within humanistic fields.We can make sense of these findings once we posit the existence of a second, equally important gender divide that can be described as the care–technical divide. Accordingly, this work develops a topological model to show that these two dimensions together account for more than 90 percent of gender segregation in the countries under study. Moreover, this model can be used to show the noticeable degree of cross-national stability in both the qualitative pattern and the overall strength of gender segregation. The empirical analyses also point to a generalized stagnation of integration of college majors in recent decades. Taken together, these results indicate that gender segregation has stabilized to an almost identical level and displays a similar qualitative pattern in several countries. This suggests that cultural forces underlying gender segregation are highly resilient, not least because they are sustained by a number of structural developments in educational and occupational institutions

Declining Social Mobility? Evidence from five linked Censuses in England and Wales 1971-2011

In this paper we add to the existing evidence base on recent trends in inter-generational social mobility in England and Wales for cohorts born in the latter part of the twentieth century. We analyse data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS-LS), which links individual records from the five decennial censuses between 1971 and 2011. The ONS-LS is an excellent data resource for the study of social mobility because it has a very large sample size, excellent population coverage, and low rates of nonresponse and attrition. Additionally, the structure of the study means that the occupations of LS-members’ parents can be observed when they were children and their progress in the labour market followed at regular intervals into middle age. For men the LS shows a trend of declining upward and increasing downward mobility between cohorts born in the late 1950s and late 1970s. For women, the trend is in the opposite direction – increasing upward mobility – although this is only evident when destination state is measured when women were in their thirties. By the time they had reached their forties, the trend toward upward mobility has, if anything, reversed. Counter to prevailing beliefs, our results show no evidence of relative social mobility ‘grinding to a halt’, let alone going into reverse. Indeed, we find a small but significant increase in social class fluidity during this period for both men and women