The Class Pay Gap in Higher Professional and Managerial Occupations

2016/06/23 by Daniel Laurison, Sam Friedman · 236 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Accounting #Business #Demographic economics #Demography #Earnings #Economic growth #Economics #Glass ceiling #Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies #Labor market dynamics and wage inequality #Labour economics #Openness to experience #Population #Psychology #Social mobility #Social psychology #Social science #Sociology #Value (mathematics) #Youth Education and Societal Dynamics

paper · doi:10.1177/0003122416653602

published in American Sociological Review 81(4), 668-695 (SAGE Publishing)

openalex publication_date 2016/06/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31

Abstract

This article demonstrates how class origin shapes earnings in higher professional and managerial employment. Taking advantage of newly released data in Britain’s Labour Force Survey, we examine the relative openness of different high-status occupations and the earnings of the upwardly mobile within them. In terms of access, we 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 occupations, such as engineering and IT, that recruit more widely. Moreover, even when people who are from working-class backgrounds are successful in entering high-status occupations, they earn 17 percent less, on average, than individuals from privileged backgrounds. This class-origin pay gap translates to up to £7,350 (11,000) lower annual earnings. This difference is partly explained by the upwardly mobile being employed in smaller firms and working outside London, but it remains substantial even net of a variety of important predictors of earnings. These findings underline the value of investigating differences in mobility rates between individual occupations as well as illustrating how, beyond entry, the mobile population often faces an earnings “class ceiling” within high-status occupations.

Citations

• Is a College Degree Still the Great Equalizer? Intergenerational Mobility across Levels of Schooling in the United States
• Hiring as Cultural Matching
• The Case for a New Class Map
• Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital

Cited by

• Are postgraduate qualifications the ‘new frontier of social mobility’?
• Can cultural consumption increase future earnings? Exploring the economic returns to cultural capital
• The Class Ceiling in the United States: Class-Origin Pay Penalties in Higher Professional and Managerial Occupations
• The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners
• The legacy of names. Persistence in social status in Sweden 1865–2015
• Occupational Licensing, Intergenerational Occupational Persistence and Social Mobility
• Stratification of educational quality judgments: Insights from two factorial survey experiments on socioeconomic differences in student and parent evaluations
• Intergenerational Mobility at the Top of the Educational Distribution
• Social Class Origin and Job Quality among Higher Managerial and Professional Occupations in the United Kingdom
• Gender and Ethnic Intersectionality in Solicitors’ Careers, 1970 to 2016
• Spatial distribution and characteristics of vulnerable occupations to artificial intelligence: cases from South Korea
• The Social-Origins Gap in Labour Market Outcomes: Compensatory and Boosting Advantages Using a Micro-Class Approach
• Following in the parents’ footsteps? Using sibling data to analyse the intergenerational transmission of social (dis)advantage in Scotland
• Where Did the Global Elite Go to School? Hierarchy, Harvard, Home and Hegemony
• The working classes and higher education: Meritocratic fallacies of upward mobility in the United Kingdom
• Race-Ethnicity, Class, and Unemployment Dynamics: Do Macroeconomic Shifts Alter Existing Disadvantages? [europepmc]
• The Spanish Labor Market: A Gender Approach. [europepmc]
• Entrenched Inequalities? Class, Gender and Ethnic Differences in Educational and Occupational Attainment in England. [europepmc]
• Who benefits most from studying abroad? A conceptual and empirical overview. [europepmc]
• Socioeconomic status and entrepreneurial networking responses to the COVID-19 crisis. [europepmc]
• The Burdens of Underrepresentation and Professional Identity: A Qualitative Study of Black Women in Academic Nursing. [europepmc]
• Socioeconomic diversity of doctors in the United Kingdom: a cross-sectional study of 10 years of Labour Force Survey social mobility data. [europepmc]
• Intergenerational educational mobility and the COVID-19 pandemic [europepmc]

Related

• The Class Ceiling in the United States: Class-Origin Pay Penalties in Higher Professional and Managerial Occupations
• Social Class Origin and Job Quality among Higher Managerial and Professional Occupations in the United Kingdom
• The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged
• Class origin closure: economic advantages of occupational elitism
• Social class and earnings trajectories in the UK: New findings from a longitudinal analysis