4.2.8 - Gender and Social Class — Classification Issues
When sociologists measure class, they usually need a practical indicator such as occupation. The problem is that gender shapes jobs, pay, hours, career breaks, and family roles, so class is never measured in a gender-neutral way. This lesson shows why the old male breadwinner model was challenged, how feminist sociologists changed the debate, and why class measurement is still methodologically contested.
Why gender complicates class
Social class research often tries to turn a broad idea like life chances, market situation, and social position into a measurable category. Occupation has usually been the main shortcut because it is easy to code in surveys and seems closely linked to income, status, and job security. However, once sociologists ask whose occupation should count in a household, gender becomes a major classification issue.
Conventional view
The idea that a married woman's social class should be classified through her husband's occupation because the family, not the individual, is the main unit of stratification.
Goldthorpe (1983) defended this conventional view. He argued that family members usually share housing, consumption, and social networks, so the household has a common class position. In a society organised around a male breadwinner model, the man's full-time occupation was treated as the strongest indicator of the family's life chances.
That approach immediately creates a methodological problem: if researchers classify households differently, they produce different pictures of the class structure. A scheme that codes a household by the man's job may place it in a different class from a scheme that codes each adult separately.
Cross-class family
A household in which partners fall into different class categories because they have different occupations or employment relations.
Cross-class families expose the weakness of simple occupational coding. If one partner is in a professional occupation and the other is in a routine occupation, there is no obvious neutral answer to the question, "What class is this family?" The classification depends on the assumptions built into the research design.
Goldthorpe and feminist critique
Goldthorpe's argument had some logic in the context of post-war family patterns. If one wage is the main source of income and one occupation shapes the household's housing, neighbourhood, and schooling options, then classifying the household as a unit can look efficient. This is a strength of the conventional view: it recognises that class is partly lived through shared household resources rather than isolated individuals.
But feminist sociologists argued that this efficiency came at a serious cost. Stanworth (1984) claimed that the conventional view made women invisible by treating them as extensions of husbands rather than social actors with their own employment conditions, earnings, and class experiences. The problem was not only technical. It reflected a patriarchal assumption that men's work defines family identity while women's work is secondary.
Abbott and Payne (1990) pushed the critique further. Rising female employment, lone-parent households, and dual-earner families meant the male breadwinner model could no longer be treated as normal. If a woman has her own job, income, and career trajectory, then coding her only through a partner reduces the validity of class analysis.
Imagine a household in which a female solicitor lives with a male plumber. If a researcher codes the household through the man's occupation, the woman's professional position disappears. If the researcher codes both adults separately, the data now show a cross-class household and reveal that class location inside families can be uneven.
This debate matters because class is supposed to explain life chances. If a classification scheme hides women's employment, it may miss differences in authority at work, income security, pension accumulation, and promotion opportunities. In other words, the research may reproduce gender inequality instead of measuring it.
Modern labour market patterns
Even when sociologists moved toward individual classification, the problem did not disappear. Modern class schemes still rely heavily on occupation, and gender shapes how occupations are experienced.
The NS-SEC classifies people mainly through employment relations such as level of autonomy, security, and authority at work. This is an improvement on older status scales because it focuses on labour-market position rather than just prestige. It also usually classifies adults individually, which answers some feminist criticisms.
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