The social mobility of ethnic minorities in Britain in the last 50 years (1972-2019)

By Professor Yaojun Li. He is with the School of Social Sciences, Manchester University. Excerpt:

"Introduction

The report presents patterns and trends of social mobility by ethnic group for the last 50 years. The report measures social mobility as the socio-economic changes that can be observed between fathers’ (or parents’) class position and sons’ or daughters’ position. This can be further differentiated into upward mobility (where children have better jobs than their fathers had), and downward mobility (where children have lower status jobs than those of their parents).

The report explores social mobility between 2 generations – the parental generation (first generation), and those born in the UK or arriving before the age of 13 (the second generation).

Main results

First generation (characteristics of parents by ethnicity)

Fathers of the first generation with an ethnic minority background were more likely than White fathers to be in the highest socio-economic class (at 35.2% for ethnic minority fathers, compared with 30.2% for White fathers).

Ethnic minority fathers were less likely to be in blue-collar positions than White fathers. This partly reflects the occupational structures of the source countries, although it also reflects the degree of positive selection of some migrant groups.

Intergenerational social mobility

Social mobility of second generation (children’s socio-economic status compared with parents’ socio-economic status)

Taking the 50-year period as a whole, people in Britain who are from professional-managerial (the highest socio-economic class) families are around 9 times as likely to find themselves in professional or managerial positions as in manual routine jobs.

For people from families of unskilled workers, their life chances are much less favourable, with less than half the chance of gaining access to professional-managerial positions as children from ‘salariat’ families (at 22.7%) and around 4 times the chance of ending up in the most disadvantaged routine positions (23.4%).

The results for people from the White ethnic group are similar to the results for the whole population.

For ethnic minorities children from families of unskilled workers were much more likely to achieve long-range upward mobility and much less likely to follow in their fathers’ footsteps compared with their White peers.

Social mobility for specific ethnic groups

People of Pakistani and Bangladeshi (combined), Black Caribbean, and Black African ethnic groups who were from professional-managerial (the highest socio-economic class) families were less likely to stay in the same socio-economic class as their parents (at 44%, 49% and 50% respectively) than the corresponding White group (54%). Conversely the rates for people in the Indian and Chinese ethnic groups (56% and 65% respectively) were higher than for White people.

With regard to the intergenerational stability in routine positions, all of the main ethnic minority groups have lower stability rates than White people – for example the Chinese ethnic group has only 5% as compared with 24% for the White ethnic group.

Social mobility over time

Several ethnic groups are making notable progress in terms of access to the highest socio-economic class and in gaining university level education. Apart from Black Caribbean and Pakistani and Bangladeshi men, most other groups have generally achieved parity with the White ethnic group.

As ethnic minorities’ family positions were higher than those of White families, they had lower levels of long-range upward and higher levels of long-range downward mobility than did White people, but became more similar to White people in the more recent decades."