Evidence of 100 year old glass walls enhancing sex-segregation

Vertical and horizontal barriers for women’s labour force participation

As the sturdiness of the glass ceiling is well known, and was highlighted just last month by Germany’s measures to  have women quota, a team of Dutch and French researchers now provides evidence that so called glass walls have hampered women’s labour force participation for more than a hundred years. While the glass ceiling is a well-known metaphor for forces preventing women to move into top positions on the labour market, the “glass wall” refers to barriers that keep women from moving horizontally, i.e. prevent them from working in various occupational sectors.

Studying more than 50,000 marriage records of brides marrying in France between 1860 and 1986, the researchers studied the determinants of female labour force participation of women at marriage. They found that on average women from more deprived backgrounds were more likely to work, but that there also were strong regional determinants, and that even today, there are differences between French women in the likelihood of working at marriage, based on the department they are born in.

Serendipity

According to the article’s first author, the most striking result in the article was the resilience of the glass wall effect, something he admittedly stumbled upon. The glass wall effect is illustrated in the animation below based on the actual research data. In the figure below, each square represents occupational sectors (so called HISCO major groups), such as service or sales, and in each square a dot represents a bride’s place of residence working in that particular sector.  The near perfect shape of a map of France made up of the blue dots, show that brides were confined to be workers in services (5), agriculture (6), and (textile) production (7/8/9) in the second half of the 19th century and most of the twentieth century. The few dots (brides) in the squares (sectors) on the left show that only few women were working in these sectors in the 19th century and that it was actually only in the second half of the twentieth century that women became professional/technical (0/1), clerical (3), and sales (4) workers on a regular basis.

Brides by HISCO Major Group (France 1860-1986). Click to enlarge image.

Open access

The results were published in the peer reviewed journal History of the Family in the special section Women at work in changing labour markets. Remarkably, the publisher Taylor and Francis granted open access to the article Working women in France for a period of six months. While very pleased with this ‘christmas gift’ from Taylor and Francis, IISH researcher Richard Zijdeman continues his quest for funds to purchase the open access rights for indefinitely. According to Zijdeman, the finding is relevant for a long time to come, as it shows the resilience of glass walls, a crucial aspect of sex-segregation often overlooked due to people’s eagerness to breakdown the glass ceiling. 

HISCAM – a ruler for social distance in the past

Researchers of the universities of Stirling, Utrecht and Cardiff have designed a new method to measure social distance in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The so called HISCAM (Historical CAMSIS) scale allows one to measure the position of persons in society and therewith the extent to which people could escape their social origins. “In other words, it allows one to measure how far the apple falls from the tree”, according to one of the researchers.

In contemporary research on class or occupational status, the position of persons in society is often determined by means of survey-research is, as was recently done in the BBC’s Great British Class Survey. Obviously, survey research cannot be used to determine social distance in historical time periods and therefore the researchers have turned to over 4 million marriage records from 7 countries (Belgium, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, France, The Netherlands and Sweden). The researchers were able to determine the social distance between occupations, by assuming that occupations that occur more often in combination with each other on the marriage record are closer to each other from a social perspective.

In addition to a scale based on the records for all countries and the entire time period, the researchers have constructed country and period specific scales. A striking fact about the time specific scales is that they reveal that over time a number of occupations change position in the social hierarchy. This is an important result, since so far sociologists have assumed that the position of occupations in the social hierarchy was constant over time. (This is actually referred to as the “Treiman constant” and was heralded the number 1 finding in 25 years of research (Hout & Diprete 2006).) However, this study shows that the initial relative premium of ‘modern’ occupations, such as that of typist and mechanic, decreases, the more people take up these occupations.

Results of this study have been published in the peer-reviewed journal Historical Methods. For more information, please visit: www.hiscam.org.

HISCAM – een meetlat voor sociale afstand in het verleden

Onderzoekers aan de universiteiten van Stirling, Utrecht en Cardiff hebben een methode ontwikkeld om sociale afstand te meten voor de negentiende en vroeg twintigste eeuw. Met de zogeheten HISCAM schaal is het mogelijk om de positie van mensen in de maatschappij te bepalen en daarmee in hoeverre mensen hoger op konden komen. “In feite kun je met de schaal bepalen hoe ver de appel van de boom valt”, aldus een van de onderzoekers.

In hedendaags onderzoek naar klasse of status wordt via survey-onderzoek bepaalt welke positie mensen in nemen op de maatschappelijke ladder, zoals onlangs gebeurde door de BBC middels de Great British Class Survey. Voor historisch onderzoek is dat niet mogelijk en hebben de onderzoekers gebruik gemaakt van meer dan 4 miljoen huwelijksakten uit zeven landen. Door aan te nemen dat beroepen die vaker  in relatie tot elkaar voorkomen sociaal dichter bij elkaar staan, kan de sociale afstand tussen beroepen worden bepaald.

Naast een schaal op basis van alle data, zijn er ook HISCAM schalen gemaakt voor specifieke landen en tijdsperioden. Interessant aan de schalen voor de tijdsperioden is dat voor een beperkt aantal beroepscategorieën de positie van het beroep in de sociale hiërarchie verandert over de tijd. Tot nu toe werd door sociologen aangenomen dat de positie van beroepen in de sociale hiërarchie constant was. De studie laat echter zien dat het aanvankelijk relatieve voordeel van ‘moderne’ beroepen, zoals dat van typiste en monteur, afneemt, naarmate er meer mensen in deze beroepen werkzaam zijn.

De resultaten van het onderzoek zijn gepubliceerd in het peer-reviewed tijdschrift Historical Methods. Zie voor meer informatie: www.hiscam.org.

Seven new social classes? My two cents on the BBC’s Great Britain Class Survey

This item was originally posted at the Is Britain Pulling Apart Blog.

April 9, 2013 at 6:36 pm

Dear Dave and Paul,

I just read your blog on the GBCS and think it’s fair, but rather mild as well. I really think the BBC’s question “Is class still important in 21st century Britain?” [as found on https://ssl.bbc.co.uk/labuk/experiments/class/ ] has not been answered by imposing a class structure on the data, through latent class analysis. This is especially something to raise one’s brows about, given the fact that they use continuous measures of status and completely ignore the ‘state-of-art’ discussion in sociology on the existence of micro-classes. One quote on the website is that the class system is nowadays much more complex, which is hard to believe with the end result of 7 classes (like there were in 1970′s). Furthermore, there is hardly any motivation of how these 7 classes are different from those of other contemporary schemes such as the British NS-SEC as was mention by Rose & Harrison, here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/apr/05/solidarity-question-social-class ).

Some other point that bothers me is the lack of focus on temporal and regional change. So, apparently, the class system changed, but there is virtually no discussion on -how-, say how the EGP’s classes were split and merged into these new ones. A similar point can be made, as you highlighted in your blog, for regional variation. So while on one level the authors are aware of regional clustering of social classes, they fail to elucidate their implicit assumption that the social class hierarchy would be the same in Ireland and England or would even be the same across England.

Another assumption that remains implicit, is that the three dimensions (economic capital, social capital, cultural capital) affect ‘class’ in the same way, which is crucial to the outcomes of the class model. (For a discussion, see here: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A1=ind1304&L=RADSTATS.) Why would the economic dimension have as much influence as the cultural dimension? Why not more or less? Furthermore, why would the three dimensions be the same across all the classes? For example, based on conflict theory one would expect that in the higher classes the cultural dimension would be more important than in the lower classes.

A final question that I would like to address is: to what extent are these new classes hierarchically ordered? If so, how was the 3-dimensional space mapped into a uni-dimensional one? I am asking since a lot of people reacting on the class scheme raise questions like “How can I be in class X, while I have properties W, Y, Z?”. A 3d projection of the dimensions, e.g. showing the different classes as clusters, would have been really interesting. Furthermore it might have revealed that the distinction between two classes would merely be the result of differences in one dimension, e.g. the amount of social capital.

I really feel that the BBC project is a successful showcase of how social science and the public can interact (for a more humorous response see: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/britons-still-relying-on-class-system-for-their-personalities-2013040364532 and http://www.jonathancresswell.co.uk/dailymail/ . The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) is actively promoting this kind of bridging between science and society, and (Dutch) researchers may use this setup to think of new ways to bring their research to the public. However, right now I don’t think the outcome of the project is properly reflecting the state-of-art in stratification sociology, as there are many other advances that have been made in research in this area that don’t seem to be engaged with.

Richard