Mothers and the Process of Social Stratification: De invloed van de moeder op het proces van statusverwerving

The present study embeds the mother's influence into the classical model of status attainment (Blau & Duncan 1967, The American Occupational Structure) that originally was designed to point out status relations between fathers and sons. This model has layed down important methodological foundations upon which much of today's research on social stratification is based. Still most of the research carried out deals only with the relation between the father's and his son's or daughter's socio-economic position. Therefore, the question in how far the mother's and her son's or daughter's socio-economic positions are related, is subject to the current investigation. How large is her influence on her son's and daughter's status attainment? How does her influence, in comparison to that of the father, affect a child's status attainment? In how far does the mother's status background have a special impact on her daughter's, compared with her son's status attainment? And last but not least, how has the mother's influence on the structure of social stratification, compared to the father's influence, changed over time? My conclusions are based on the empirical results drawn from several sources of data: U.S. American (NSFH), German (West German Life History), and Dutch (Households in the Netherlands 1995, Netherlands Family Survey 1992-93) representative household surveys. The first general conclusion is that the mother's socio-economic resources always have been and up to this day remain to be an important source for the transfer of status advantages from one generation to the next. Her influence on her children's educational attainment is as large as the father's influence. However, observed through a period of 40 years we notice a steady decrease of the influence of both parents on children's educational levels. As parents' influence declines, slowly some differences evolve regarding the relative weights of parents' socio-economic resources for the determination of children's levels of schooling. To an increasing degree parents' (mean) educational level is becoming the important predicament to prognosticate their offspring's educational level. Hence, the education of children is becoming less restricted by the fact that parents have good jobs and can afford to pay for their children's schooling, but increasingly delimited by their parents' (mean) educational level. Regarding occupational reproduction, the mother's job status influences only her daughter's and not her son's occupational attainment. What is more, her influence increases as the career of the daughter advances. As the daughter's career continues her job status becomes increasingly similar to that of her mother. The dynamic perspective of occupational status reproduction thus reveals the existence of an occupational sex-role model between mothers and daughters. Furthermore, part of my analysis showed that the importance of the mother's occupational status for the daughter's occupational attainment increases for birth cohorts born between 1965 and 1975. In general, studies that find a decreasing influence of social origin on occupational reproduction are based on older data. According to these current results we may be witnessing a reversal of trends found for women's occupational status reproduction in recent years.