Implications

Abstract

This monograph started out with the empirical problems of classifying women in a way that would be useful in investigations where the focus of concern was inequalities between women. We were concerned to go beyond the standard critique of the practice of using husband’s occupational class to explore what would be involved in deriving a useful indicator, and to assess how the social class classification matches up to desiderata for a classification which can both display inequalities and point towards their explanations. Although the data which initially prompted this exploration were related to birth events, because our objectives were to address the methodological problems of analysing social inequalities between women in general, we have also analysed a wide range of other data. The purpose of this final chapter is to summarise what we have learnt.