8.4.2: Women in Studies of Social Mobility About half of sons pass their fathers on the social class ladder, about one-third stay at the same level, and about one-sixth fall down the ladder. (Blau and Duncan 1967; Featherman 1979) “Only sons!” protested feminists at that time in response to the research on social mobility. “Do you think it’s good science to ignore daughters? And why do you assign women the class of their husbands? Do you think that wives have no social class position of their own?”
Following the intellectual sexism of the time, the male researchers smugly brushed these objections aside, replying that there were too few women in the labor force to make a difference. Since then, there has been a structural change in the U.S. Labor force, as millions of white-collar jobs and the professions opened up to women.
Almost half of U.S. workers are now women, and in our less sexist environment, sociologists would not consider excluding women from their research. Researchers have found that behind upwardly mobile women are parents who encouraged their daughters to postpone marriage and get an education (Higginbotham and Weber 1992). For upwardly mobile African American women, strong mothers are especially significant (Robinson and Nelson 2010).
Research on women’s mobility has exposed a gender gap: Women are less likely than men to be upwardly mobile, as measured by living in families with higher income than the one in which they grew up (Reeves and Venator 2013).
An extreme gender gap shows up in the top 1 percent of families.
In 19 of 20 of these families, the richest of all, women got into the top 1 percent through the income of men.
In only 1 of 20 was it the woman’s income that got them there (Yavorsky et al. 2019) (Marina 2019).
With research on the social class of women in its infancy, the social mobility of women is going to be a fruitful area of research in coming years.
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