The Association between Husbands' and Wives' Occupations in Two-Earner Families

The structure of a society's status hierarchy is usually investigated through the analysis of occupational mobility, that is, the association of fathers' and sons' occupations. This paper introduces another indicator that is conceptually similar but empirically distinct: the association of husbands' and wives' occupational statuses. Five important findings emerge: (1) the association is symmetrical-it does not matter whether husband or wife is taken as referent when assessing the association; (2) most of the association is due to status consistency between husbands and wives; (3) the strongest status effect separates lower nonmanual from blue-collar occupations; (4) the compound effect of consistency and status effects is to produce strong status-group boundaries separating farm from nonfarm and manual from nonmanual occupations; (5) a comparison with a father-son mobility table reveals a striking amount of similarity, reinforcing the view that the husband-wife association and father-son association tap the same underlying structure.