One of this book's core messages is that British mobility rates are relatively high but unevenly distributed. Adding numerical flesh to the bones of this broad-brush argument is best done by concentrating mainly on a single representative dataset, thus avoiding repetition and potential confusion between studies that differ in small ways because their operational definitions are not strictly comparable (see Appendix).

Data from the 2014 LFS survey have been chosen because it is the most recent dataset at the time of writing. Its tabulations are increasingly becoming available to the public and were assembled from data collected by well-established methods from over 30,000 informants with incomes – a relatively large sample. Indeed, the LFS sample is sufficiently large that it can be treated as two subsamples of females and males, which allows the argument of a gendered labour force from the previous chapter to be followed through.

Analysis of the data demonstrates that mobility has to take account of several, interconnected processes. The most obvious is that there are inequalities of outcome in the mobility competition, which can be attributed to social advantages or disadvantages (‘class’ differences) or to individual ‘abilities’ (see chapter Ten). The second element is the availability of employment, within which the mobility competition takes place: how important are the labour market changes under occupational transition? Third, the previous chapter identified gender differences in employment patterns, which may reasonably be expected to play into mobility outcomes. The analysis here is not intended to give a definitive answer but rather to show that all three of these elements make substantial contributions not only to overall mobility rates but also to particular occupational groupings. It follows that the mobility regime is not uniform: there are pockets of high and low mobility, and people experience a variety of outcomes. A number of other explanatory factors such as education (discussed in the next chapter), ethnicity and geographical variations are acknowledged, but discussion of these goes beyond the scope of the present chapter.

Women, paid work and female class

To develop this perspective of alternative interacting explanations, the example of mobility of men and women offers two main alternative interpretations.