Social inequality in relation to gender

Gender and life chances

Education is seen as the main method of improving life chances and social mobility
- Females generally out-perform males at all levels of education
  - At GCSE, girls consistently get more A*-C grades
  - UCAS (2013): Women are a third more likely to enter higher education
  - British Universities (2014): More females than males graduated with an upper-second or higher-class degree
Feminists have pointed out that subject choices throughout school tend to be gender-stereotyped
- This leads to the reinforcement of both horizontal and vertical gender segregation in the workplace
  - Choice of degree subjects affects career choice and therefore opportunities for upward social mobility

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The UK labour market is characterized by horizontal segregation
- This means different sectors of employment are dominated by different genders of workers
  - Women make up about 79% of the health and social work workforce
    - Women are over-concentrated in clerical, administrative, retail and personal services such as secretarial, cleaning, adult social care and catering jobs
  - Men are 10x more likely to be in skilled jobs or be managers, senior officials or self-employed
The UK labour market is also characterised by vertical segregation
- This means different genders dominate different levels of jobs
  - Within occupational groups, women tend to be concentrated at lower levels
  - When women do gain access to upper professional or management jobs they encounter a 'glass ceiling'
  - The Equality and Human Rights Commission (2011): Women lack access to higher jobs, it will take 50 years for women to be equal to men with men at senior levels as judges at 70 years to achieve equality in Britain's top 100 companies
  - 30,000 women a year are dismissed after becoming pregnant.
  - It is estimated that 440,000 women a year miss out on promotion and higher pay due to pregnancy and maternity leave

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Some sociologists claim vertical segregation in the workplace had led to a 'feminisation of poverty'
- About 25% of women will live in poverty when they retire compared to 10% of men
Chant: Women are more likely to be poor because they experience 'time poverty'
- While men spend their younger years building up their career and working their way up the poverty scale, women spend this time having and raising children
- When they re-enter the workplace they have to begin their career over at the bottom of the pay-scale
Globally, women made up 49.6% of the world's population but 70% of the world's poor
Women are often unable to work as they are full-time carers for children, the sick, the disabled and the elderly
Women are less likely to have an occupational pension
Trussell Trust (2014): food poverty affects men and women differently as women often go hungry to feed their families
Joseph Rowntree Foundation: Women believed poverty undermined their ability to be a good parent. Women felt unhappy they couldn't afford Christmas presents or holidays and that their children had to wear second-hand clothes to school. Mothers in poverty were also more likely to suffer poor mental health

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Lee Savage: Men were 40% more likely to climb the career ladder than women
Women working in 2016 have higher wages than their mothers, but rarely higher wages than their fathers, however, working men in 2016 usually have higher wages than both
Li and Devine: women are still less likely to be upwardly-mobile and more likely to be downwardly mobile
Social mobility and Child Poverty Commission (2015): social mobility rate for men has flat-lined whereas for women it has improved
Girls born in the 1940s to middle-class parents were eight times more likely than working-class girls to grow up to be middle-class. However, girls born in the 1970s were only four times more likely than their working-class peers.
The 1980s saw an increase in the service sector which saw a rise in the number of women going to work
This feminisation of the workforce was due to a noticeable improvement in girls at GCSE, A-Level and degree-level
However, relative social mobility is declining for both genders born in the 1980s who have reached their 30s in the 2010s

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Girls have generally out-performed boys in recent years at GCSE level in every subject, often by a significant margin, except maths
Boys are twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with special educational needs. In 2016, 14.7% of boys and 8.2% of girls are on SEN support
Four-fifths of permanent exclusions from school are boys

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Girls have generally out-performed boys in recent years at GCSE level in every subject, often by a significant margin, except maths
Boys are twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with special educational needs. In 2016, 14.7% of boys and 8.2% of girls are on SEN support
Four-fifths of permanent exclusions from school are boys

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