The seminar titled 'Do Cultural Capital and Social Capital Explain the Social Origin Pay Gap?' was presented by Michael Vallely, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, ESRI. It took place on Thursday 24 October 2024.
Please find Michael's presentation.
Details of Seminar:
Michael Vallely, ESRI made his presentation. Subsequently, a discussion was open to the floor where the chairperson, Paul Mac Flynn, NERI Co-director presented questions to Michael.
Abstract:
A recent wave of empirical evidence has found an unexplained social origin pay gap in several high-income countries in that individuals from working class origins experience a pay penalty relative to individuals with the same levels of education from upper-class backgrounds. Research on the 'class ceiling' has controlled for educational attainment and a range of labour market observables, highlighting that strictly human capital factors do not fully expalin the pay differences among equally qualified individuals from different social origins. Therefore, there are other factors, beyond the narrow notion of human capital, that are class related, and can influence individuals' wages. A wealth of qualitative literature shows that cultural capital and social capital can play a role in explaining the social origin pay gap, in terms of hiring and recruitment process, how they influence individuals' networks, their ability to establish 'fit' within managerial and professional occupations and people's chances of promotion. However, no study has yet to quantitatively examine this. Thus, this article examines the extent to which cultural capital and social capital explain the social origin pay gap using data from waves 1-9 (2009-2019) of Understanding Society. We observe significant pay gaps for all social origin groups, except for those from lower managerial and professional (NS-SEC 2) origins, after controlling for the respondents' demographics, education and labour market observables. We find that the social origin pay gap marginally increases after controlling for cultural capital but decreases when controlling for social capital. This suggests that part of the pay gap is likely to represent the impact of unequal access to social capital. When we consider both forms of capital, we observe the pay gaps are further reduced compared to when only controlling for social capital. This suggests that both forms of capital complement each other and consideration of both may play a role in explaining the social origin pay gap.