Abstract
In this article, we are interested in the differences in the educational pathways and subsequent labour market outcomes by social origin and gender. We apply sequence analyses to model the educational trajectories and conduct regression analyses to determine how the individual’s own social status and the salary at labour market entry differs. First, our results show that educational pathways vary by parental status and gender when controlling for reading and mathematics/science skills. Men and pupils with a lower socioeconomic background are overrepresented in vocational education, whereas women and pupils with a more privileged socioeconomic background more often pursue general and academic tracks. Second, these different trajectories lead to unequal occupational status and income. Besides these indirect effects, significant direct effects of parental status and gender on the individual’s own occupational status and salary can be found. Together, these findings provide a broad overview of the emergence of inequalities by gender and social origin over the early life course, ranging from differences in skills learned in school to labour market outcomes.
Highlights
Unequal opportunities for attaining higher education or a decent salary can intersect and combine to cumulativeadvantages
The first step of our analyses addresses the primary effects at the intersection of social origin and gender
The second cluster differs in the respect that the vocational education at the secondary level is followed by tertiary education, mainly at a university of applied sciences
Summary
Unequal opportunities for attaining higher education or a decent salary can intersect and combine to cumulative (dis)advantages. The artificial Figure of the “catholic working-class girl from the Social Inclusion, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 3, Pages 79–94 countryside” was born (Allmendinger, Ebner, & Nikolai, 2010; Becker, 2007; see Peisert, 1967). With social changes, such as, for example, the expansion of education, post-industrialisation, increasing globalisation and (at least in legal terms) gender equality, the symbolic figure of cumulative educational disadvantage has transformed from the “worker’s daughter” to the “migrant son” (Geißler, 2005). This should not hide the fact that first, improved education has not translated into equal work opportunities for men and women (Blau & Kahn, 2017; Charles, 2011) and second, persons with a lower socioeconomic family background may be disadvantaged in the education system, and in the labour market (Mood, 2017)
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