Previous research has shown that an advantaged social class position protects individuals from unemployment, but less is known about how this relationship has developed after the turn of the millennium, how it varies by gender and to what extent education contributes to the association between these factors. We assess these questions using register-based data on the Finnish labour force over a 28-year period between 1988 and 2015. The overall risk of unemployment was 2.7–3.7-fold among manual classes compared to upper non-manual classes, and 1.4–1.7-fold among lower compared to upper non-manual classes. Controlling for education attenuated the differences between social classes by about two-thirds. Social class disparities were somewhat more distinct among men than among women, but gender differences narrowed over time. Overall, temporal changes were small, especially among men, except for a curvilinear pattern observed for the relative unemployment risk of the lower non-manual class. To conclude, despite a comparatively egalitarian context and drastic changes in economic conditions and labour market structures over time, social stratification in unemployment has been substantial and considerably persistent. This is in line with the conceptualization of social class underpinning differing employment relations and, therefore, inherently creating variation in labour market risks.
We developed a multiple pathways sequential logit model for analysing social background inequality in completed education and applied it to analyse educational inequality in Finland (birth cohorts 1960–1985). Our model builds on the sequential logit model for educational transitions, originally presented by Robert D. Mare and later extended by Maarten Buis, which disaggregates inequality in completed education into the weighted sum of inequalities in the transitions leading to it. Although the educational transitions framework is popular among educational stratification researchers, its applications have almost exclusively focused on analysing inequalities in separate educational transitions. Buis presented a unifying model of inequalities in educational transitions and completed education, which gives a substantive interpretation to the weights that link them. We applied this to an educational system in which the same educational outcomes can be reached through multiple pathways. Our analysis of Finnish register data shows that intergenerational educational persistence increased, particularly among women. The main reasons are increased inequality in academic upper-secondary (gymnasium) completion and gymnasium expansion that increased the weight of this transition as well as of the transition to university. We discuss the integration of structural and allocative mechanisms in educational stratification research.
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