Trends in Occupational Mobility: The Gender Gap in Sweden

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to develop earlier work on the intergenerational occupational mobility of men and women in order to bring gender variation into focus. Against the background of the changing structure of occupations, various measures, often used in mobility studies to estimate class inequality, are applied to estimate gender inequality in the Swedish labour market over a thirteen-year period in which one of the major features of social change may well be the extension of dependence on gainful employment to women of all social strata Results show a narrowing, but by no means eliminated, gender gap in certain broad aspects of occupational opportunities in the younger cohort of the adult labour force. However, they also show that age is a crucial variable when the actual occupational attainment and thus potential for self-sufficiency of women are compared to that of men with similar social background.