Speed Bumps on the Road to Meritocracy: Occupational Mobility of
Women and Men in the U.S., 1972-1994
Michael Hout, University of California-Berkeley
Abstract:
After 25 years of improvement, opportunity through social mobility has
levelled off in the United States. The association between occupational
origins and destinations did not change between the first half of the 1980s
and the first half of the 1990s. Detailed mobility tables from the
General Social Survey show that the effect of socioeconomic origins
on the socioeconomic status of women's and men's occupations in 1991-4
is at the same level found in the early 1980s. Previous research showed that
class barriers to mobility fell by 30% between the early 1970s and the
early 1980s.
Women's opportunities continued to improve as the women's share of
professional and managerial employment grew again in the most recent period.
Other important components of the association between origins and destinations
did not change significantly over the 1972-94 period. Structural mobility,
another key component of the mobility process, declined throughout the period.
Occupational redistribution associated with the emerging postindustrial
economy affected the parents of the youngest of today's workers, so the
difference between origins and destinations is not as great as it was
25 years ago.