Is There a Caring Class? Intergenerational Transmission of Care Work

Abstract

Most research on intergenerational social reproduction has been concerned with upward and downward movements across rank-ordered, "big-class" categories or along continuous gradients of status, income, or skill. An exception is the more nominal conceptualization of the social structure offered in recent research that focuses on qualitative differences in life conditions across occupational "microclasses. " The present analysis broadens this nominal approach by considering social reproduction across an important qualitative dimension that bridges multiple occupations: whether or not one's work centrally involves care. Based on data from the U.S. General Social Surveys, results provide little evidence that care work is transmitted from parents to children. While women and men whose parents worked in care are more likely to do so themselves, this association is attributable to a general tendency for people to work in the same detailed occupation as their parents. Parents pass along their vertical status positions, and sometimes their specific occupations, but not care work as such. Parent-child similarity in caring outcomes likely reflects transmission of values, skills, knowledge, and network ties that are specific to detailed occupations, rather than attributable to care work broadly defined.

Prosocial Occupations, Work Autonomy, and the Origins of the Social Class Pay Gap

“…Occupations that score low on nonprofit orientation include air traffic controllers and mining operators. Consistent with past research (Charles et al, 2015;Themudo, 2009), and supporting the validity of this measure, nonprofit orientation was strongly correlated with the proportion of women in the occupation (r = .49, p < .001), and its educational level requirements (r = .50, p < .001). We standardized social interest and nonprofit orientation and averaged them together (α = .84).…”

“…This pattern of occupational sorting may help explain the class pay gap. Prosocial occupations often require advanced degrees and are considered highly prestigious (e.g., pediatricians, educators, clinical therapists; Charles, Ellis, & England, 2015), but various factors could lead prosocial occupations to pay less than autonomous occupations (i.e., those with high work autonomy). Employers may assign lower salaries to prosocial occupations because society tends to devalue communal skills and responsibilities (England, 1992) and because people are willing to accept lower salaries for meaningful and prosocial work (Hu & Hirsh, 2017).…”

Planning a Career in Engineering: Parental Effects on Sons and Daughters

“…For example, some parents may emphasize the importance of service as a necessary component of meaningful work, while others may stress the importance of job security or pecuniary success. Many studies have documented the inter-general congruence of connection of values, although the connections are sometimes weaker than one might expect and the pathways can be hard to pinpoint [44][45][46][47].…”

Graduates’ Opium? Cultural Values, Religiosity and Gender Segregation by Field of Study

“…Gender-unequal cultural values are thought to reinforce gender-essentialist ideals, i.e., widely shared beliefs that women are better at caring, nurturing and human interaction, whereas men excel at abstract thinking, problem solving and analysis (Sikora and Pokropek 2012;Charles et al 2015). Anti-egalitarian values might be expected to shape gendered identities of individual men and women to encourage the choice of gender-confirming fields of study, and thus increase segregation.…”