Introducing the class ceiling: social mobility and Britain's elite occupations

Most research on social mobility focuses on entry into Goldthorpe-inspired large occupational classes; it thus misses both important distinctions between occupations that are grouped together, and social origin differences in individual success within those occupations. This paper takes advantage of newly released large-scale social origin data (from the UK Labour Force Survey) to examine the relative openness of different 'elite' occupations, and the earnings of the upwardly mobile within those occupations. In terms of access, [the authors] find a distinction between 'traditional' professions, such as law, medicine and finance, which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals, and more technical high-status occupations such as engineering and [information technology] IT that recruit more widely.

However, even when those who are not from professional or managerial backgrounds are successful in entering elite occupations, [the authors] find that they have significantly lower earnings, on average, than those from privileged backgrounds. This class-origin pay gap among higher managers and especially higher professionals persists even net of a variety of important predictors of earnings. These findings underline the value of investigating differences in mobility rates between individual high-status occupations as well as illustrating how, beyond entry, the mobile often face considerable disadvantage within occupations, and point to the possibility of a 'class ceiling' of class-based discrimination.

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