Gender Differences in Intragenerational Mobility: The Case of Estonia

The collapse of the socialist system, designed to be as an alternative to a market-based system, created a natural historical experiment. The countries engaged in this experiment devised various ways to introduce and develop a market-based society. In a previous article [Titma and Roots (2006): European Societies 8, 493526], we examined intragenerational mobility in the first stage of the transition (19911997) using cross-national data on five post-Soviet countries obtained from the Paths of a Generation (PG) project. In this article, we investigate patterns of intragenerational mobility and factors facilitating it in the second period of the transition (19982004). We focus especially on gender as an important factor in intragenerational mobility. We expected that the extent of mobility would decline as the labour market becomes more institutionally regulated. Surprisingly, we find that intragenerational mobility in Estonia is even higher in the second period of transition than in the first period. While men were advantaged relative to women in the first period of the transition, we find that women were more successful than men in gaining positions in the upper strata and in white-collar positions in the second stage of the transition.