The impact of mothers. Intergenerational mobility in Sweden 1865-2015

How does parental social status affects child status attainment across time? Social mobility studies have traditionally studied parent-child associations using one ‘dominant’ parent to reflect social origin. However, the institutions of family and work have changed substantially over the past 150 years, in Sweden as elsewhere. These changes are associated with changes in intergenerational
status mobility; one-parent to child social mobility increased in Sweden as the country modernized, but two-parent mobility did not. The father-child rank correlation first increased as Sweden industrialized and transitioned from the production unit to breadwinner-homemaker family type, and subsequently decreased. The impact of mothers’ occupational status increases substantially as society transitions from breadwinner-homemaker to dual-earner family type, although mothers’ occupational status has always been important in dual-earner families. In the 1970s Sweden becomes a dual-earner society, and among cohorts born in this decade mothers’ occupational status is roughly of the same
importance as fathers’ occupational status for child status attainment. Gender continues to play an important role in intergenerational transmission throughout the period studied, with same-gender parent-child associations being stronger than cross-gender associations. Homemaker mothers are positively associated with child status attainment, and breadwinner fathers show stronger intergenerational associations – but both only in a breadwinner-homemaker society. Parental resources accumulate; we observe multiplicative accumulation of parental status in both historical and recent cohorts, while observing compensatory accumulation in specialized breadwinner-homemaker cohorts.