Abstract
An examination of the way women move between jobs was a central focus of the empirical analysis reported in the last chapter. The occupational profiles described there were constructed essentially from horizontal movements between occupation groups; that is, between jobs which were in the same occupational category or an equivalent status occupation. When disruptions occurred to women’s employment, vertical occupational mobility was found to occur in many instances; that is, movements up or down, but mainly down the occupational scale. It is to these vertical movements we now turn. The WES data provided the rare opportunity to examine women’s experiences of vertical occupational mobility over their lifetime. The analysis rests, of course, on being able to identify vertical moves up and down the occupational scale; this is an issue which is discussed below. It was possible to see from the results when and why vertical occupational mobility occurred, the extent of these experiences and how often women recovered from a loss of occupational status. The findings have an important bearing on the theories of labour market mechanisms and how women fit into labour market structures.
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Notes and References
Sandell and Shapiro (1978) and Corcoran and Duncan (1979) estimated that only 25 to 30 per cent of the earnings gap could be accounted for by work history differences.
Excluding women from the 50–59 age group whose experience of downward occupational mobility (71 women) was a result of being demobbed at the end of the war reduced the frequency in the total sample of this age group from 61 per cent to 55 per cent.
Looking-after-home has been grouped together with the more obvious childbearing reasons for leaving a job since it was often given as a reason for leaving jobs over the childbearing phase even when a birth followed.
Some of the movements may be horizontal between clerical and semi-skilled jobs — but there is no reason to expect that these spurious ‘vertical’ moves were more frequent across childrearing breaks than at other times.
Killingsworth (1983) discusses the problems of sample selection biases and their effects on the sizes of correlation coefficients.
The missing dummy variable from this list of occupations is semi-skilled factory.
The highest qualification category, A-levels or above, was omitted since it was highly correlated with the occupational categories like teaching and nursing.
See Pindyck and Rubinfeld (1976) for a description of logit regression.
Joshi (1985) estimated the costs of women of having children.
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© 1987 Shirley Dex
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Dex, S. (1987). Occupational Mobility. In: Women’s Occupational Mobility. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18572-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18572-6_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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