The DemoSoc seminars at Universitat Pompeu Fabra aims to gather all researchers at UPF and beyond working on the fields of demography and sociology (social stratification).

The next DemoSoc Seminar of this course will take place on:

March, 25th

12.00 h 

20.237 (Jaume I)

Access to and pay gaps within higher professional and higher managerial occupations in the UK 

Michael Vallely, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at ESRI, will be in charge of leading the session

Abstract: Although there is research on the direct ethnic effects on pay gaps (Cantalini, et al., 2022; Pinto et al., 2023), there is scarce research on how social origin and the resources related to this i.e. social capital and cultural capital, explain such pay gaps. Recent evidence has uncovered a social origin pay gap in several high income countries, even when educational attainment and occupational status have been controlled for. Several UK studies have found a social origin pay gap using different types of datasets (Britton et al., 2022; Crawford and van der Erve, 2015, Crawford and Vignoles, 2014, Laurison and Friedman, 2016). Research has also found a social origin pay gap in the US (Friedman and Laurison, 2024) and European countries, such as Spain (Bernardi and Gil-Hernandez, 2021), Norway (Mastekaasa, 2011) and Sweden (Hällsten, 2013). Some of this literature has focused on pay gaps within higher professional and managerial occupations but no study as of yet has analysed these occupations separately or examined the intersection between ethnicity and class in relation to pay within such occupations.

This paper uses data from waves 1 to 14 (2009 – 2024) of Understanding Society (the UK Household Longitudinal Study) to examine access to and pay within higher professional and higher managerial occupations in the UK labour market. Thus, a contribution of this paper is that we examine access to and pay within these types of occupations separately, to examine if they differ in terms of how socially exclusive they are, and to examine, if any, the size of pay gaps within these occupations. Firstly, we consider access and pay in relation to respondent’s ethnicity, their social origin (proxied via parental occupation) then consider the intersection between ethnicity and social origin. We also consider gender as an important explanatory factor in our analysis. Initial results indicate greater barriers in accessing higher managerial occupations but larger pay gaps within higher professional occupations.