Events

Abstract:  This paper studies in longitudinal perspective the direct effect of social origin (henceforth, DESO) on female occupational attainment in Italy and investigates the role of parenthood in shaping its trend and magnitude over the career.

Past research on social stratification and mobility has extensively shown that family background is substantially associated to occupational achievement, even when education is controlled for (Erikson and Jonsson 1998; Breen and Goldthorpe 2001; Bernardi and Ballarino 2016). However, analyses of intergenerational mobility have mainly looked cross-sectionally at measures of occupational destinations such as the first job or the occupation at the moment of the interview. Only recently, research has started to study these issues from a dynamic perspective, analysing the whole process of career development (Barone et al. 2011; Passaretta et al. 2018; Ballarino et al. 2020).

Despite this growing attention towards the analysis of intergenerational mobility from a dynamic perspective, longitudinal studies on women are still scarce (Harkonen et al. 2016). In fact, focusing on the female population requires to enlarge the theoretical and analytical framework, integrating social stratification and mobility research with the sociology of the family, since female careers are strongly affected by family events such as parenthood (see Cantalini 2020 for a review).

This paper thus aims at studying a) when the DESO appears among Italian women and if it decreases, remains stable or increases over the life course, and b) if parenthood contributes to shape its magnitude and trend over the career.

Empirical analyses are based on growth curve models with random effects (Halaby 2003) estimated on longitudinal data created from the Multipurpose Survey – Family and social actors (ISTAT 2009). The analytical sample includes 5,267 women born from 1930 to 1980 and who had at least one employment episode, followed in the first 15 years after labour market entry. The empirical strategy is divided in two steps. In the first, group specific growth curves (Brüderl et al. 2019) are estimated by interacting social class of origin and years since first labour market entry, in order to study how the DESO evolves over the life course. Since career breaks are crucial when studying female careers, we study both the probability to withdraw from the labour market as well as the occupational achievement, measured through the International Socio-Economic Index of Occupational Status (ISEI, Ganzeboom et al. 1992). In the second step, we also include an interaction between social class of origin and time since first birth in the models, in order to study if parenthood contributes to the DESO as a result of differential career consequences of motherhood according to social origin.

Results show that the DESO in occupational status appears already at labour market entry and then slightly increases over the life course, whereas the social origin gap in the probability of career breaks is small in the first years after labour market entry and then increases. Parenthood does not contribute to the DESO because of different probabilities to become mothers across individuals from different social origins. Rather, it contributes to the increase of the DESO over the life course because of different career trajectories after motherhood, with higher risks to leave the labour market among women from the lower classes and (slightly) higher occupational premia among women from the service class.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Hilary Term is convened by Bess Bukodi and Colin Mills For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.