Research Seminar: Maternal Social Origin and the Intergenerational Transmission of (Dis)Advantage

Event Date: 4 November 2025

Speaker: Dr Michael Vallely, Chancellor’s Fellow, Scottish Centre for Employment Research, WEO 

Time: 12:30 - 13:30 GMT

Location: Hybrid (Strathclyde Business School and online)

For booking details please email sbs-weo@strath.ac.uk

Authors: Michael Vallely and Seraphim Dempsey

Abstract:

Increased labour market participation of women has changed the dynamic of two-parent households in the UK in two ways. First, while historically fathers have been the sole working parent, households with two working parents have become the most common household type. Second, as women have slowly attained positions associated with higher labour market power, an increasing number of mothers work in similar or ‘higher’ occupations than their spouse. This paper explores how these two historical trends influence the impact of social origin on the life outcomes (educational attainment, occupational status, and earnings) of the next generation in the UK. We compare the traditional approach in the literature using the ‘dominance approach’ i.e. the parent with the ‘higher’ occupational class, to models which include information from both parents. A particular novelty of the paper is that we explore these outcomes in relation to the gender of respondent’s socially ‘dominant’ parent. We find the life outcomes of individuals from middle and working-class origins are broadly similar, indicating more of a class than gender effect, but observe more variation by gender for individuals from upper-class origins. The gender of the socially ‘dominant’ parent appears to matter more for people who come from upper-class origins, and we observe larger variation for sons and daughters among these groups. The largest differences are observed if the mother was the ‘dominant' parent and worked in a professional/managerial occupation. The results highlight the complex intersection between social origin and gender and how transmission effects vary in relation to these between generations.

Published: 30 October 2025