separately, recognising the increasingly important gender dimension and providing a compelling overview of gendered patterns of social mobility in Europe. The study of patterns of intergenerational social mobility is based on occupational classes, which classifies people
who have reached occupational maturity, deemed to be at least 35 years of age. Thus, the empirical analysis of trends in intergenerational mobility has a somewhat historical element. The qualitative information relates more specifically to the last decade and captures current issues in terms of policy debate and policies put in place to mitigate the challenges and promote upward social mobility.
A key strength of the report is that it is built on four sources of information:
£ data from a high-quality survey (the ESS)
£ an extensive review of literature and research from many Member States
£ policy assessments from Eurofound’s network of European correspondents
£ validation/analysis in review meetings with key experts from the Baltic countries, the Netherlands, Poland and the UK.
The analyses focus not only on research, but also on policies and the links between them. The main limitation of the report is that it presents results for many countries in a brief format, meaning that analyses and interpretation are necessarily constrained.
However, Eurofound hopes that the results presented in the report can serve as a basis for more in-depth follow- up work by other organisations. Such work is
particularly needed to further assist policymakers in implementing appropriate policies to facilitate upward social mobility.
Patterns of social mobility
The report focuses on specific concepts related to social mobility. It recognises that the definition of these concepts has not been the same in all scientific research; nevertheless, the report aims to be clear about how concepts were defined and measured – and why these choices were made. This is particularly relevant to the empirical analyses, as comparison with results from other research depends on the definitions of the relevant population, the indicators selected to measure social mobility, the specification of
occupational classes and the criteria for classifying the categories of horizontal, upward and downward mobility.
In measuring social mobility, Eurofound uses
occupational status as the key indicator. Occupational class position is a reflection of an individual’s
involvement in economic life (which is essentially their participation in the labour market) and of their employment relations. Occupation has been identified
inequalities and as one of the most important – in terms of impacts on a wide range of an individual’s life chances and life choices. The strength of classifying by occupation is that it is associated with three important aspects of economic life: income security, short-term income prospects, and longer-term income prospects. It is also an appropriate indicator for capturing the patterns of social mobility within the timeframe that the ESS data covered. There may be an issue regarding the rapid changes in the modern world and discussion might need to take place about the difficulties of measuring these changes. This certainly applies to the changes happening in the labour market, with the growing prevalence of self-employment, freelance and other non-standard forms of employment and the consequences of these changes on the current ordering of occupations into classes. However, it is important to note that Eurofound’s empirical results provide
information on the patterns of those born between 1927 and 1975 and should be viewed and interpreted within that context only.
It was decided to focus explicitly on intergenerational mobility in this study, analysing social mobility processes for women and men separately as well as analysing them for three distinct cohorts/generations. The first part of the empirical section deals with absolute mobility, while the latter part examines relative mobility (‘social fluidity’). In terms of methodology, absolute mobility relates to structural change in societies; it is measured in terms of individuals’ upward and downward mobility. Social fluidity relates to equal opportunities and is measured in terms of chances of movement between occupational classes.
To understand the scale and pace of social mobility in European societies, it is important to acknowledge differences in their developmental trajectories and occupational structures. Generally, in western European countries, jobs in service classes and the
administrative/clerical class are more numerous, while in the southern European countries, many individuals still work in agriculture and routine, unskilled labour. Eastern European countries lie in between.
The changes observed from one generation to the next are expected: in later-developing countries in the south, mobility is greatest from farm work or other self- employment towards skilled manual and sales and service occupations. In eastern Europe, the movement from blue-collar occupations towards higher service classes, sales and services is more predominant. In central and north-west Europe, structural change after 1970 was modest because western European societies had already undergone extensive changes in
occupational structure.
In general, rates of absolute mobility depend on whether a country’s occupational structure has
changed substantially. If a country’s labour market does
not change structurally, there are fewer chances for upward mobility – unless for some reason a large number of people experience downward mobility at the same time. The precondition for upward social mobility is therefore economic growth. Changes in absolute social mobility show marked country variations, with the UK, for example, showing little change in
occupational structure. Similarly, Bulgaria and Hungary have not seen their social stratification change much in the last generations, albeit for different reasons. The countries that have changed the most are Cyprus, Finland, Greece and Poland, which have seen massive mobility out of agriculture towards manufacturing and services over the last generation or so.
Structural change that involves change of occupational structure and size of population in various occupations can enable upward mobility: at least, this was the case across three cohorts in 20th century. The analysis shows how different mobility patterns evolved for men and women. In a majority of countries, women have become more upwardly mobile while men are more likely to experience downward mobility. In this sense, women are without a doubt advantaged by structural change and deindustrialisation. Having said that, structural shifts that changed the occupational structure for the Generation X cohort (born 1965–1975) have also led to the level of social mobility among men and women becoming more similar: the more dissimilar the occupations of respondents and their parents were in a given country, the more similar was the extent to which men and women had moved away from their parents’ occupation.
More recently, given the slowdown in economic growth and the widening of social and economic inequalities, policy attention has focused on equal opportunities (or inequality of opportunity) and the transmission of (dis)advantage. To varying degrees, equality of opportunity has been on the policy agenda since the Second World War both in Europe and the US; however, the current debate both at EU level and in many Member States reveals growing concern with the lack of equal opportunities in access to schools, jobs,
healthcare and quality childcare.
A socially fluid society is one in which all citizens can achieve economic success commensurate with their talents and efforts, independent of their social origin; in one way or another, this is related to equality of opportunity. Results from the ESS show that the levels of social fluidity (relative mobility) in 24 EU Member States converged over the 20th century: Member States have become more similar in terms of social fluidity among Generation X than they were among the cohort born before 1946 (the ‘silent’ generation). However, after that, the picture is more mixed and an overall slowing down of convergence – if not more divergence among countries – can be observed. The results show different patterns, with social fluidity increasing in some
Social mobility in the EU
countries while decreasing in others. To sum up, levels of social fluidity changed in different directions for the countries analysed and sometimes in different ways for men and women. By and large, social fluidity increased more for baby-boomers than for the silent generation in most countries.
The overall patterns of social fluidity indicate a group of countries where fluidity has continuously been
increasing: Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia and Greece. These are the only countries, where the chances for equal opportunity have increased over all three cohorts. In another group of countries, Generation X – in particular – has experienced a decrease in social fluidity: this is most marked in Sweden, but is also evident in Austria, France and Bulgaria. A third group of countries show stable levels of social fluidity over time – Germany, Poland, the UK and Ireland.
Eurofound decided to examine social fluidity by gender, as the overall country patterns may hide differences between levels of social fluidity for men and women. Indeed, the results clearly show that apparently stable levels of social fluidity may hide opposing trends for men and women, which – in the statistics – cancel each other out unless the figures are broken down. Social fluidity levels in the second half of the 20th century moved in opposite directions for men and women in Germany, Spain, and the UK. In Germany and Spain, social fluidity for men kept increasing across the three cohorts examined; however, more women of
Generation X were limited by their social origin than women of the baby-boom. In the UK, the opposite was the case: social fluidity increased for women across the three cohorts, but more men in Generation X were limited by their social origin than was the case for baby- boomers.
Results show that in several countries it is men, especially those of Generation X, who have started to experience decreasing levels of social fluidity: this is the case in the UK (as just mentioned) but it is also the case in France, Sweden, Austria, Estonia and Bulgaria. In contrast, social fluidity among men has increased in Germany and Spain as well as in those countries where the overall levels of social mobility have been high for both sexes (the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Belgium and Greece).
Social fluidity has in general changed less for women than for men. Social fluidity has increased for women in the UK, Czech Republic, Finland and – most notably – in Belgium and the Netherlands. In contrast, social fluidity has decreased in Austria, Sweden, Germany and Spain. In general, the results from the empirical work are in line with previous research, but they cover more countries and provide new information, especially regarding gender. More research is needed to
understand the drivers and determinants behind these patterns and the factors that may influence different