Social stratification of men and women in Sweden 1880-2015

In this study, I describe changes in the social structure of the Swedish workforce over the long term by comparing different historical measures of stratification from early industrialization up until today: social class (HISCLASS), occupational status (HISCAM), and microclass – all based on HISCO. Importantly, I describe how these stratification measures combined describe the social structure of men and women and changing gender differences therein over time. Occupational social status is consequential for various life outcomes, but the meaning of a person’s social status depends on its relative position in the social structure they live in. I situate the changing social structure in its context of structural transformation: economic growth, women’s labor force participation, occupational diversification, sectoral change, routine vs. relational work, and skill levels among the workforce. To do so, I align occupational coding from nine full count censuses from 1880 until 1990, and occupational registers from 2001-2016 for a consistent mapping across 1810-1985 birth cohorts. I show gradual occupational upgrading and gender convergence among working men and women over the past hundred-fifty years, across all dimensions of social stratification. This is linked primarily to sectoral change (industrialization and post-industrialization) among working men and increases in skill level among working women. While vertical gender differences largely disappear by the 2000s, important horizontal gender differences in the social structure remain. Microclass overlap between genders shows that reduced gender differences are associated with increases in non-routine work among men, earlier dominated by women. Occupational upgrading has been more pronounced for working women than men, especially at the high and low end of the social structure. For men, occupational upgrading has been concentrated among higher social strata, with high-skilled classes growing at the expense of medium?skilled classes, and occupational status mostly increasing above the median – suggesting polarization during the industrialization and post-industrialization phases. Such polarization is not observed for women.