TODAY “social mobility” is a synonym for fairness and meritocracy in many Western societies. 

There are all kinds of flaws with this as a project — and they become abundantly clear when we consider women’s experiences. 

By examining women’s lives across the past century, we see the need to fight for a more egalitarian society and for true liberation — not just a few more black or female faces in our ruling class.

The sociologist John Goldthorpe set the parameters for how mobility is measured and understood back in the early 1970s. 

Goldthorpe argued that mobility could be measured between a father’s class at the age of about 35, and his son’s class in adulthood.  

Goldthorpe’s model omitted women because, he said, “it is difficult to envisage any factors which … would be likely to result in any sizeable number of women occupying markedly different class positions from those of the male ‘heads’ of their families, or possessing attributes or engaging in activities which would in themselves materially influence the class position of [the] family unit.”

Despite this major flaw, policy-makers have relied on Goldthorpe’s model ever since. 

More recent measurements of social mobility have tried to take women into account. But they all still treat mobility as something we should measure by tracing the journeys of individuals between occupations or income levels.  

There are huge problems with this approach, problems that are particularly pertinent for women. 

By looking beyond statistics, uncovering hundreds of personal testimonies and talking to women and men, I’ve examined what it means to live in a society where we are told that social mobility is the route to greatness. 

What I’ve found is that a society that champions social mobility tends to reinforce sex discrimination — the success of a few at the top relies on the labour of a lot of people at the bottom, and they tend to be women.  

Men’s mobility was often at the expense of women’s. The earlier 20th century relied on sisters going out to work at an early age so that families could afford to keep a single son in education long enough for him to get the necessary qualifications for clerical work. 

This lessened after the second world war, but in migrant families, which were often reliant on low-paid work, this reliance on daughters sacrificing opportunities for sons continued. 

Women’s support was crucial to those men who did get up the ladder. In the early 20th century, many upwardly mobile clerks were the sons of domestic servants. 

There was a crucial connection here: both jobs required working-class people to labour in middle-class spaces. 

These mothers taught their sons skills they’d learned — deference, discretion and gratitude. 

In a far later generation — the millennials — this has also been true of black British workers who have achieved upward mobility by entering middle management through what I call the “diversity” industry in the public sector. 

In healthcare and education, black women are often called upon to undertake caring and pastoral work, as “mentors” or “ambassadors” that white professionals are not expected to do. 

They either shoulder a double workload, or are shunted into administrative posts that allow their employers to record an increase in their black and female employees, but don’t satisfy those workers who had hoped to become university lecturers or hospital doctors.

Women’s experiences show how empty the promise of social mobility is. For although more than half of British people experienced mobility across the past century, few people have moved very far. 

Those of us with a Marxist understanding of class would question if they’ve moved from one class to another. 

The greatest amount of mobility was always between manual and white-collar work — and this was even more true for women than for men, because their job opportunities were so limited.

Women’s own social mobility was highly limited because of sex discrimination. Women’s work was often considered less valuable because it was done by women, or seen as “feminine” — care work falls into that category.  

Or women made a success of something from which they were then excluded. Women often found a foothold in new ventures where the old boys’ network was not yet established. 

For example, in the 1920s some highly educated women found work  at the new BBC. The BBC’s first director-general, Lord Reith, wanted to recruit male Oxbridge graduates, but they preferred the tried and tested routes available to them such as the Civil Service. 

Reith fell back on Oxbridge-educated women. But by the mid-1930s, the BBC was a successful venture, and Reith, under some pressure from recent male appointments, imposed a marriage bar, thus summarily dismissing some of the women who had built up the corporation and curtailing the career opportunities of many more. 

“Social mobility” assumes a hierarchy that is unchanging and inevitable. But women’s experiences show that the value attributed to certain kinds of work is political, not objective or static. 

Upward mobility was greatest in the 1950s and ’60s because of an expansion in room at the top. 

For women, the expansion of the welfare state, and opportunities in teaching, nursing and technical work were particularly important. 

But these gains weren’t handed to women on a plate. A huge increase in trade unionism occurred in the post-war decades, and part of this was concentrated in clerical and professional occupations dominated by women. 

These workers fought for better negotiation rights as well as more pay; for equality between men and women (an especially vigorous fight in schoolteaching), and in welfare work for their professionalisation. 

Many women challenged the notion that social mobility was the social and political benefit it has been presented as by generations of social scientists and politicians. 

Because they experienced discrimination on the grounds of their sex, as well as the inequality experienced by men and women as a result of class, they were often highly critical of the notion of “meritocracy” — or understood that for it to work, some really hard work would be required to define exactly what “merit” meant. 

And because of their potential and actual role as mothers, women always understood that liberation should envision a full life beyond the workplace. 

Women were instrumental in the establishment of adult education in the early 20th century through the Workers’ Educational Association. 

As teachers, they argued strongly for comprehensive education to be introduced after 1945, and as head teachers of secondary modern schools they were influential in arguing that a far greater proportion of children would benefit from advanced education than the 11-plus allowed. 

In the 1970s second-wave feminists established law centres, community social work initiatives and youth clubs. 

In the new polytechnics they created women’s studies courses, youth work diplomas and placed women’s history on the curriculum. 

They created new spaces for women to work in, professionalised some women’s work, and carved out routes by which women could enter the professions — law centres, for example, enabled many women to qualify as solicitors. 

Crucially, these projects arose from collaboration and co-operation — not from the individualistic competition for a few places at the top. 

In my book, those who questioned the notion of social mobility play a crucial role. For they are a reminder that the ladder is only one vision of society, and not a particularly fair one at that. 

As we look beyond the Covid crisis, we see anew that what these women were fighting for — an appreciation of the value of caring work, of co-operation and of the innovation that arises from such collaboration — is what we urgently need now. 

Selina Todd is professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. Her latest book is Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth (Chatto & Windus).