Page 139 - DSOC202_SOCIAL_STRATIFICATION_ENGLISH

Social Stratification

Notes hairdressing establishments which employ a few assistants. In the reverse direction, the
proportion of those who move out of the employer and self employed classes (Classes 1 and
2) is nearly 50 per cent higher for women than for men. Women in these locations not only
form a much smaller proportion of all economically active women, but are also relatively
insecurely placed. Many of them are homeworkers. A similar comparison can be made about
women in Class 7. The proportion in this class (made up of those in supervisory positions
and in strongly unionized industries) is about one third of the proportion amongst males,
and the rate of outflow is 7.2 per cent per year, compared with 4.3 for men.
Overall the residuals show that the benchmark model of quasi-independence fits the class
changing of women rather more closely than it does that of men, suggesting that there may
be a lesser degree of class closure in the female occupational structure. Moreover, women in
manual jobs who change class are considerably more likely to move into a non-manual than
a manual occupation. The pattern of residuals does not reveal as clear cleavage line between
the manual and non-manual sectors as was evident in the table for men. For example, there
is more mobility between Class 5, clerical, and Class 8, lower manual, than the quasi-
independence model would lead us to expect, and only slightly less in the reverse direction.
Class theories generally propose that one of the major divisions in the class structure is that
between manual and non-manual occupations. Although numerous studies have examined
this boundary, they have almost always considered only the male occupational structure
(but see Heath and Britten, 1984). The data in Table 7.4 suggest that if a demarcating line
exists, it apparently fails to act as a barrier to women’s class mobility. This may be because
the distinction between the manual and non-manual classes, although clear and well-
supported for men’s employment, is not significant for women’s jobs. Alternatively, it may
be that the observed mobility is an artefact stemming from a mis-classification of a manual
occupation as a non-manual one.
Table 7.5 shows the occupational composition of the cells in Table 7.4 which contain the
largest flows. Over one third of the movement from Class 5, clerical, to Class 8, lower
manual, is the result of the downward mobility of shop saleswomen and assistants into
lower manual jobs, and nearly one third of the upward mobility from the lower manual to
the clerical class is due to movement into this occupation. The important role which the job
of shop assistant can play in women’s work-histories is illustrated by the Women and
Employment Survey (Dex 1983). Women often became shop assistants as temporary measure
when it was difficult for them to find alternative work. They were frequently school leavers
taking their first job, married women on their first return to work after child-birth, women
with domestic constraints or those who had just moved house.
Dex also shows that there is considerable mobility between shop work, semi-skilled factory
work, semi–skilled domestic work and other semi-skilled work. While these occupations
have been usefully gathered together into a single ‘semi-skilled’ profile by Dex, in most
schema (including the KOS schema) mobility between them would represent at least one
change and possibly two changes of class. To a large extent the magnitude of the observed
class mobility between the clerical and lower manual classes, and the apparent absence of a
manual/ non-manual divide amongst women’s occupations, can therefore be attributed to
the conventional placement of shop assistants into the non-manual category.
Treating the occupation as a manual one, that is as having conditions of services and
rewards more similar to manual jobs than clerical ones, would have the effect of reducing
the apparent flow across the manual/non-manual line. However, it would still leave the
flows between Classes 5 and 8 as the second and third largest in the table. Furthermore,
there is substantial mobility of sales assistants into mangerial jobs, and the reassignment
would also have the effect of increasing the flow between Class 8, lower manual, and Class
3, professional and managerial, by about 60 per cent. An alternative tactic would be to assign
sales people to a class of their own, as Heath and Britten (1984) propose, but in relation to its

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