Social Mobility – Open and Closed Systems, Types of Mobility, Sources, and Causes of Mobility

Defining Social Mobility

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• Wallace and Wallace define social mobility simply as the movement of a person or persons from one social status to another; the movement normally carries changes in life chances (market position) and lifestyle (status display) along with it.
  • Mobility is not confined to class position alone — adopting a new language, accent, or set of mannerisms can itself shift a person’s standing in a relatively open structure.
• Pitirim Sorokin, whose 1927 book Social Mobility founded the field and supplied most of its working vocabulary, defined it more broadly: the shift of position may be undertaken not just by an individual but by a group, or even by a social object or value — anything created or modified by human activity can, in principle, move.
  • Social mobility is therefore best understood as the reorganization of gradation in a society, where the gradation itself is expressed in terms of power, prestige, and privilege.
• Because mobility presupposes a hierarchy to move within, its nature, form, range, and degree are never independent of the type of stratification system a society runs — this is why mobility cannot be studied as a topic separate from stratification itself.
• Mobility also functions as a diagnostic: the extent to which a society allows movement is treated as an indicator of how meritocratic it actually is, and of how stable or brittle its class architecture is likely to remain over time.

The Open and Closed Continuum

• Sociology textbooks present open and closed systems as two ideal types, but no real society sits at either pole — the honest way to frame the question is not “is this society open or closed” but “how open is it,” since every actual system falls somewhere along a continuum between the two extremes.
  • A closed system always leaks some mobility at the edges; an open system reproduces advantage across generations so reliably that its actual mobility rate falls well short of what its own achievement ideology promises.

Closed Systems of Stratification

• In a closed system, ascriptive criteria — birth, age, sex, parentage — assign a person’s place in the structure, and no amount of individual merit is allowed to override that assignment.
• The system emphasizes the associative character of hierarchy: it treats the existing distribution of power, status, and the means of production as legitimate by nature, and actively discourages or suppresses any attempt to alter it.
• Considerations of functional suitability (is this person actually good at the job?) or of equal opportunity carry no legitimate weight in deciding who occupies which position.
• Weber’s concept of social closure describes the mechanism that keeps such systems shut: a dominant group monopolizes rewards and opportunities by closing off access to outsiders through a boundary-marking device — caste endogamy among Hindus is the clearest Indian illustration of closure in practice.

Open Systems of Stratification

• In an open system, the prevailing norms actively prescribe and encourage mobility rather than blocking it, and ranking runs along several independent principles — status, class, and power can each be pursued somewhat separately.
• Position is assigned chiefly on the basis of merit or achievement, and the system is marked by occupational diversity, a flexible hierarchy, and a comparatively rapid pace of change.
• The hold of ascription-based corporate groups — caste, kinship, extended family — visibly weakens, and the dominant values shift toward equality of opportunity, individual freedom, and a positive valuation of change and innovation.
• Industrialization and urbanization are the chief historical drivers of this shift: caste in India illustrates a system offering little scope for mobility, while class in industrial societies illustrates one offering comparatively immense scope.
• Even so, open systems retain informal gatekeeping — every society sets criteria (correct manners, family lineage, the right schooling, racial affiliation) that must be satisfied before a person is actually allowed to rise, regardless of what the system’s own ideology claims.

Four Historical Forms of Stratification and Their Channels of Mobility

• Even class systems, the most open of the four, carry real limits on mobility that their own ideology tends to obscure — for decades no Black American reached the presidency despite the country’s formal commitment to equality of opportunity, and the great majority of senior corporate positions everywhere remain disproportionately held by men.
• Anthony Giddens links the rate of mobility in a class system to its degree of internal cohesion: where the rate is low, most people stay within their class of origin across a lifetime, which reproduces a common life experience across generations and produces high class solidarity; where the rate is high, that reproduction breaks down.

Types of Social Mobility

Vertical and Horizontal Mobility

• Vertical mobility is movement of an individual, family, or group along the social hierarchy itself — a genuine change of rank, not merely of role.
  • Sorokin split vertical movement into an ascending current (social climbing) and a descending current (social sinking); an industrial worker who becomes a lawyer has moved up, a dispossessed aristocrat forced into manual labour has moved down.
• Horizontal mobility — which Giddens also calls lateral mobility — is a change of position or role that leaves rank untouched: a rural labourer becoming an industrial worker in the city, or a schoolteacher transferring from one school to another, has changed occupation without changing stratum.
• In practice the two combine constantly in modern societies: an employee promoted to a senior post in a branch office located in another city, or even another country, experiences vertical and horizontal mobility in the same move.

Intergenerational and Intragenerational Mobility

• Intergenerational mobility compares a child’s adult status to the status of the parental household — a landless labourer’s son becoming a factory supervisor, or a clerk’s daughter becoming a civil servant.
  • This is treated as the standard measure of how open a society genuinely is: where intergenerational mobility is very low, life chances are effectively fixed at birth and inequality is built directly into the social structure; where it is substantial, people are visibly able to achieve new statuses through their own efforts regardless of their origin.
• Intragenerational mobility (also called career mobility) tracks change within a single person’s own working life — joining a bank as a probationary officer and retiring as its chairman is the textbook case.

Structural and Exchange (Circulation) Mobility

• Structural mobility is forced mobility: it is produced by a change in the shape of the occupational structure itself, not by any individual’s merit or effort.
  • Industrialization creating a large number of new white-collar and professional positions is the classic driver — those positions must be filled from below regardless of who, specifically, fills them, so mobility follows mechanically from the changed shape of the structure.
  • A decline can move the same way: the mass shutdown of cotton mills and the spread of synthetic fabrics pushed India’s mill workers down the hierarchy as a group, independent of their individual competence; a sudden influx of highly skilled or unskilled immigrants can similarly reshuffle class alignments.
• Exchange mobility (also called circulation mobility) is the mobility left over once structural change is accounted for — one person’s rise is matched by another’s fall, with the overall size of each stratum held constant, so movement here reflects a genuine exchange of positions rather than the emergence of new room at the top.
• Because absolute mobility is simply the observed total of structural and exchange mobility combined, while relative mobility isolates the exchange component net of structural shift, this distinction sets up the more consequential absolute/relative contrast covered below.

Group and Individual Mobility

• Individual mobility occurs when a single person’s own accumulation of economic means, prestige, or power shifts their position — most personal-talent-driven mobility takes this form.
• Group mobility occurs when an entire collectivity rises or falls together, with its position relative to other groups changing while the internal ranking within the group stays intact — the Vaishyas’ rise with the expansion of trade and agriculture in the later Vedic period, or a caste’s rise through Sanskritization, are both instances of group rather than individual mobility.

Sponsored and Contest Mobility

• Ralph Turner distinguishes two normative modes by which societies distribute elite status, using the metaphor of two different kinds of race.
  • Contest mobility keeps the competition open for as long as possible and awards status strictly through the outcome of that open contest — his American reference case, where the ideology insists no door is ever permanently closed.
  • Sponsored mobility has the established elite select promising recruits early and induct them through a controlled, gate-kept process — his English grammar-school reference case, where an eleven-plus-style examination sorts children onto separate tracks well before adulthood.
• India’s reservation policy is a clear instance of sponsored mobility: a policy decision, not open market competition, determines who is inducted into which institutions and positions.

Absolute Mobility and Relative Mobility (Social Fluidity)

• Absolute mobility is the actual, observed proportion of people who end up in a different class from the one they were born into — a straightforward headcount of movement.
• Relative mobility, also called social fluidity, asks a sharper comparative question: net of any change in the shape of the occupational structure, what are the comparative odds of a child from a privileged origin versus a child from a disadvantaged origin ending up in the same destination class?
• Goldthorpe’s Oxford Mobility Study established the decisive finding here: absolute mobility rose sharply in post-war Britain because the occupational structure itself changed — there was simply more room at the top as white-collar and professional jobs multiplied — but relative mobility, the comparative chances of a service-class child and a working-class child both reaching the service class, barely moved at all.
  • More people moved up in absolute terms; almost nobody’s odds improved. A society can therefore look dramatically more open on the surface while remaining exactly as unequal in the underlying chances it hands out to children of different origins — the shape of the occupational ladder changing is not the same fact as the rules of the game becoming fairer.
• This distinction should anchor every serious answer on mobility: a rising absolute mobility rate, cited on its own, says nothing about whether a society has become genuinely fairer.

Range of Mobility: Short-Range and Long-Range

• When people move up or down the hierarchy, the social distance they cover can be small or large — short-range mobility covers movement between occupational positions that sit close to one another; long-range mobility covers a large jump across several strata at once.
• Blau and Duncan, working from a national sample of 20,000 American men, concluded that the United States showed a great deal of vertical mobility overall, but that nearly all of it was short-range — long-range mobility, the kind that would carry someone from the very bottom to the very top, was rare.
• Frank Parkin, by contrast, drew attention to genuine instances of long-range mobility, arguing that short-range findings alone understate how much movement a sufficiently open system can generate.

Objective and Subjective Mobility

• Objective mobility is a change measured against an external, verifiable criterion — income bracket, occupational category, educational qualification.
• Subjective mobility is a person’s own perception (or others’ perception) of whether they have moved, which need not track the objective measure at all — a household can feel it has “arrived” well before or well after its objective indicators actually shift.

Types of Mobility at a Glance

Sources and Causes of Mobility

The standard list of causes is best organised by the level at which each factor operates — structural, institutional, and individual — since a single factor like education actually straddles more than one of these levels at once.

Structural-Level Causes

• Industrialization expands and diversifies the occupational structure, drawing specialized occupations out of the kin group and into factories organised on bureaucratic principles; Harold Gould argued this is what separates the occupational role from the person occupying it, since performance qualities rather than birth become the basis for filling it.
• Differential fertility creates room at the top on its own: where higher strata reproduce at a rate below what is needed to fill their own ranks, vacancies open up that must be filled from below, purely as a demographic fact.
• Migration and urbanization sever people from ascribed local hierarchies — a migrant to the city is no longer bound as tightly by the caste or kinship position that governed their village life.
• Technological change simultaneously destroys some occupations and creates others, forcing whole occupational groups either up or down the hierarchy regardless of any individual’s own choices.
• War can also compress this process sharply, since heavy loss of life in a war necessitates an unusually high degree of replacement mobility to refill vacated positions.

Institutional-Level Causes

• Mass education functions as the chief institutional channel of mobility in modern societies, formally opening access to positions once reserved by birth.
• The legal abolition of ascriptive barriers — untouchability, formal racial exclusion — removes a state-backed obstacle to movement, even where informal social barriers persist afterward.
• Affirmative action and reservation deliberately engineer mobility for groups that market competition alone would leave behind.
• The spread of a market economy rewards purchasing power over ritual status, which is precisely why traders and artisans historically gained ground under commercialization even without any change in their ritual rank.
• Politicization and democratization give previously excluded groups access to political power, which can then be converted into further economic power and prestige — mobility here becomes an index of modernization as such, tracking economic development and political opening together.

Individual and Subjective-Level Causes

• Educational attainment, skill, and personal talent remain the most visible individual-level routes, though sociologists caution that individual-talent mobility on its own is the exception rather than the rule — for mobility to occur on any sizable scale, structural change of the kind described above has to be present as well.
• Marriage functions as a mobility channel in its own right, historically most significant for women under the estate and caste systems, but never confined to them.
• Entry into large testing and sorting institutions — the army, the church, the bureaucracy — has historically opened routes upward for individuals born outside the elite.
• Subjective factors — aspiration, motivation, and the degree of exclusivity a person is willing to challenge — shape whether an objectively available opportunity is actually seized.
  • Robert Merton’s reference-group theory explains why aspiration varies even among people facing identical objective conditions: a person seeking mobility adopts a non-membership group as their reference point rather than their own group, and engages in anticipatory socialization — rehearsing the values and manners of the group they aspire to join before they have actually arrived in it.
  • Oscar Lewis’s “culture of poverty” thesis offers the pessimistic counterpart: a value system marked by fatalism, present-time orientation, and low aspiration can perpetuate itself across generations of the poor independently of whatever structural opportunity may actually exist.
  • Non-merit factors intrude even here — appearance and manner can carry a real advantage in mobility outcomes independent of any measurable skill or qualification.

Sorokin’s Four Primary Factors

Sorokin isolated four factors he treated as operating in every society, distinct from the secondary factors specific to particular times and places.

• The demographic factor — the birth rate of higher strata runs consistently lower than that of lower strata, so net population growth continuously opens vacancies at the top that lower-strata members must fill; the same logic operates between rural and urban populations, where migration compensates for a lower urban birth rate.
• Mismatch between the abilities of parents and children — ascribed status positions do not reliably track ability across generations, so children in ascriptive societies are not always as suited to their inherited position as their parents were, creating pressure for readjustment.
• The faulty distribution of individuals in social positions — Pareto’s famous formulation captures this:

“History is a graveyard of aristocracies.” — Vilfredo Pareto

Over time, ruling groups lose the very qualities that justified their original position, or individuals from lower strata come to exhibit those qualities instead, and a change in elite personnel follows.

• Change in the environment — economic, social, political, legal, and technological shifts (globalization, democratization, rising literacy and education standards) continuously reshape the opportunities available for movement.

Lipset and Bendix’s Five Factors, and the Convergence Debate

• Lipset and Bendix argued that the rate of social mobility shows a basic similarity across industrial societies, and — counter-intuitively — found no clear association between a country’s mobility rate and its rate of economic growth; mobility rises once industrialization reaches a certain threshold, largely independent of growth rates thereafter. They listed five specific drivers:
  • Changes in the number of vacancies available.
  • Different rates of fertility across strata.
  • Changes in the social rank accorded to particular occupations.
  • Changes in the number of inheritable status positions.
  • Changes in the legal restrictions governing access to opportunity.
• Miller, working with a larger dataset than Lipset and Bendix had access to, challenged their convergence thesis directly: mobility rates across industrial societies do not, in fact, converge, which suggests that cultural factors and the design of the education system matter independently of industrialization itself, not merely as its by-products.
• Later work split further on this question: Featherman, Jones, and Hauser argued that similarity across industrial societies holds only once relative mobility rates are considered (the so-called FJH hypothesis), while Erikson and Goldthorpe’s comparative work found no single common trend across societies once the comparison was pressed further.

Sorokin’s Channels of Vertical Circulation

• Sorokin described five institutions as the “elevators” of vertical mobility: the army, the church, the school, political and economic organizations, and the family (chiefly through marriage).
• His deeper point is that these institutions do more than passively transport people upward — they simultaneously test, select, and distribute individuals, so the school, for instance, does not merely move people up the ladder, it sorts them by an internal criterion and then legitimates that sorting as fair.

Key Empirical Studies on Mobility

Landmark studies at a glance:

• Michael Young’s satirical The Rise of the Meritocracy remains the sharpest single rebuttal to the idea that open societies are actually responsive to talent — the book’s fictional future traces how a society that believes itself fully meritocratic ends up just as stratified as the one it replaced, only now with the added cruelty of telling the people at the bottom that they deserve to be there.

Education and Social Mobility: Promise versus Reproduction

• Blau and Duncan’s status-attainment model traces a causal chain from a father’s occupational status through the son’s education and first job to the son’s eventual occupational status — education is the single largest link in this chain, mediating most of the effect that a father’s status has on where his son ends up.
• Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital explains why education so often fails to deliver on its promise: schools reward a set of competencies — vocabulary, cultural references, ease of manner — that children from the dominant class absorb at home before they ever enter a classroom, and the school then misrecognises this inherited competence as raw individual talent.
  • The consequence is that the very mechanism society treats as its fairest, most meritocratic sorting device becomes, in practice, the most effective and least visible way of legitimating inherited advantage — a child who succeeds looks like they earned it, and a child who fails looks like they simply lacked ability, when in both cases the outcome tracked family background all along.
• The Indian case fits this pattern closely: decades of expanding school enrolment have measurably raised absolute mobility, without dissolving the underlying caste and class disparities that determine who actually gets access to quality education, as opposed to schooling in name only.

Elite Self-Recruitment and the Circulation of Elites

• Pareto’s theory of the circulation of elites describes two distinct mechanisms by which elite membership changes: individually, talented people from lower strata rise into the elite through personal achievement; collectively, when an existing elite’s abilities are seriously called into question, groups from the lower strata can challenge and displace it outright.
• Max Gluckman described the first, milder mechanism — turnover of individual office-holders that leaves the underlying structure of positions intact — as “repetitive change”, drawing on his study of African chiefdoms, where one chief replaces another without the office of chieftainship itself changing.
• Maurice Duverger drew the sharper structural line: a conflict can stay “within the regime”, contesting who occupies which position without altering the structure of positions itself, or it can become a conflict “over the regime”, ending in a change to the structure of positions itself — the same distinction that separates positional mobility from genuine structural change.
• Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class supplies a psychological explanation for why every stratification system generates its own pressure toward mobility: since a person’s self-estimation rests heavily on how others evaluate them, individuals will always aspire to the positions their own society deems worthwhile, which is exactly why Sanskritization works — the very act of climbing shows a deep commitment to, not a rejection of, the caste system’s own values.
• Beteille notes the paradox this produces: groups aspiring upward want desperately to be included among the higher ranks, but once they arrive, they move quickly to protect their own exclusivity against the next group climbing behind them — inclusion and exclusion operate simultaneously rather than one replacing the other, a dynamic close to Weber’s concept of social closure.

Gender and Social Mobility

• Michelle Stanworth offered a pointed feminist critique of Goldthorpe’s Oxford Mobility Study: by classifying married women according to their husbands’ class position rather than measuring women’s own occupational trajectories, the study effectively erased female mobility from the record before it could even be studied.
• Heidi Hartmann argued that women, along with much of the middle class more broadly, face a persistently greater risk of downward mobility than of rising into positions of real socioeconomic importance — a risk that studies built around male household heads routinely miss.

Mobility in India

Historical Channels of Mobility in India

• During the Rig Vedic period, ranking initially followed demonstrated merit rather than fixed birth — those skilled in sacred learning (brahma) were called Brahmins, and those skilled in warfare were called Rajanya, before these functional titles later hardened into hereditary categories.
• The classical channels of mobility identified for the ancient period are Sanskritization; conversion to Buddhism, Jainism, and other heterodox sects, which offered an explicit religious exit from Brahmanical ranking; migration to a new region where one’s origin was unverifiable; and renunciation — taking up the life of a wandering mendicant or preacher, which placed a person outside the caste hierarchy altogether.
• The medieval period added further routes: conversion to Islam, and participation in the Bhakti and Sufi movements, both of which offered forms of spiritual equality that cut across caste boundaries, at least within the devotional community itself.
• Mughal rule was not a fully closed system either: groups of Central Asian Saka and Huna origin rose to acquire the title and status of Rajputs; Kayasthas entered Mughal administrative service and became court scribes; Marathas achieved political mobilization from a Kunbi peasant base and subsequently adopted a Kshatriya lifestyle; and urban artisans who accumulated wealth moved to claim Vaishya status.

Sanskritization, Dominant Caste, and the Limits of Group Mobility

• M.N. Srinivas’s concept of Sanskritization describes how a low or middle-ranked caste, over a generation or two, claims a higher position in the local hierarchy by adopting the ritual practices, dietary restrictions (vegetarianism, teetotalism), and customs of a twice-born caste it wishes to be identified with.
• The qualification Srinivas himself insisted on is the crucial one for any answer on this theme: Sanskritization delivers positional change for the group, not structural change to the hierarchy itself — the group climbs to a new rung, but the ladder, and the principle that ranks people by ritual purity, remains exactly where it was. Other groups still occupy the rungs above and below; only the identity of who stands where has shifted.
• Srinivas’s related concept of the dominant caste shows a second route to the same kind of positional rise: where a caste possesses numerical strength, control of local land, and (increasingly) political power, these secular resources convert into higher social rank even without any change of ritual practice at all. Weber made a parallel observation, noting that entire castes have historically risen in rank over successive generations through exactly this kind of resource conversion.
• Whether vertical mobility can ever produce genuine structural change even within a formally closed system — rather than mere positional reshuffling — needs a two-part answer rather than a flat yes or no. Any single episode of individual or group mobility within caste is positional and leaves the underlying structure intact. But the cumulative effect of new, non-traditional sources of mobility — mass education, statutory reservation, the anonymity of urban life, and the impersonal market — has measurably eroded the ritual basis of ranking over time, producing a genuine and growing disjunction between a person’s caste and their actual occupation in contemporary India. That disjunction is real structural change, even though no single mobility event produced it on its own.

Urbanization and the Changing Basis of Status

• Harold Gould argued that industrialization transferred specialized occupations out of the context of kin groups and into factories organised on bureaucratic principles, which meant occupational role and role-occupant became separated in principle — performance qualities, not birth, became the criterion for filling a role, and economic reward and mobility became the standard measures of a role’s worth.
• Urban life grants a degree of anonymity and independence from rural social controls that villages cannot offer: caste, ritual, and tradition lose some of their pervasive grip in the city, and people increasingly pursue status on an individual or nuclear-family basis rather than as members of a wider caste or kin collective.
  • A person can effectively “pass” by mastering the surface symbols of a status — language use, occupational competence, an appropriate lifestyle — with these being socially rewarded largely irrespective of caste origin.
  • Traditional status has not disappeared, however; it persists most strongly in the most private domains — family and neighbourhood — with marriage remaining the arena where caste and kinship considerations reassert themselves most forcefully even for otherwise thoroughly urbanised individuals.
• Urbanization does not universally lift people upward — technological displacement has pushed some traditional occupational castes down the hierarchy just as decisively as it has pulled others up. The water-carrier castes of northern India, displaced across large areas by the spread of handpumps, illustrate downward mobility driven by exactly the same forces of change that create upward openings elsewhere.

Consequences of Social Mobility

• Frank Parkin treated a relatively high rate of upward mobility as a political safety valve: it channels the ambitions of able members of the working class into individual advancement, which prevents the accumulated frustration that would otherwise build up if upward routes were closed off. He connected this directly to comparative history — America’s relatively open social structure meant it never produced the sharp class wars that Europe’s far more rigid structure and pronounced class inequality did generate.
• Marxist critics read this same “safety valve” effect very differently: if mobility only ever channels a handful of individuals out of an exploited class without altering the underlying relations of production, it functions to defuse collective resistance rather than to remove exploitation — the escape of a few workers changes nothing about the structural relationship between capital and labour that keeps the rest in place.
• Ralf Dahrendorf argued that modern Western societies now offer enough scope for individual advancement that people compete with each other as individuals rather than organising together as members of a homogeneous class:

“Instead of advancing their claims as members of homogeneous groups, people are more likely to compete with each other as individuals for a place in the sun.” — Ralf Dahrendorf

He added the important qualification that mobility diminishes the coherence of groups and the intensity of class conflict without eliminating either outright.

• Giddens similarly criticised treating classes as fixed containers that different individuals simply pass through over time — Schumpeter’s image of classes as buses, carrying different passengers at different times while the vehicle itself stays the same, captures this static way of thinking about class that high mobility rates call into question.
• Mobility carries clear positive functions beyond social cohesion: greater innovation, creativity, and productivity among the upwardly mobile, and a corresponding boost to economic growth.
• It also carries genuine costs. Merton’s strain theory frames one of them precisely: where a society’s culturally approved goals (material success, status) are held out to everyone but the legitimate means to reach them are not equally distributed, the resulting strain pushes some people toward innovation — pursuing the approved goal through illegitimate means — producing what is sometimes called an anomie of infinite aspiration. Rapid mobility can also weaken kinship ties and is associated with a rise in social deviance more broadly.

Contemporary Evidence: How Open Is Mobility Today

• The World Economic Forum’s Global Social Mobility Index placed India at 76th out of 82 economies assessed, with a score of 42.7 — behind every other BRICS economy except South Africa, and well behind Russia (39th) and China (45th). India scored comparatively better on lifelong learning (41st) than on social protection (76th) and fair wage distribution (79th), and was flagged as one of the countries with the most to gain from improving its social mobility performance.
• The World Bank’s Global Database on Intergenerational Mobility, most recently updated in a 2024 study covering 153 economies, confirms the Great Gatsby Curve across this expanded sample — countries with higher income inequality consistently show lower intergenerational income mobility — and finds that India records the lowest level of intergenerational income mobility in South Asia.
• A detailed study of India’s own long-run mobility trends, using India Human Development Survey data across birth cohorts from the 1950s to the 1980s, found that overall upward educational mobility has stayed essentially flat since before economic liberalization, even though average education and income levels have both risen sharply — growth lifted living standards without meaningfully changing the odds of moving to a higher relative rank.
  • Within that overall flat trend, the study found sharply diverging paths by social group: sons from Scheduled Castes closed roughly half of their mobility gap with forward/other castes over the period studied, and Scheduled Tribe sons closed about 30% of theirs, a change the researchers linked to the effect of constitutional affirmative action.
  • Muslim sons, by contrast, saw their mobility decline steadily across the same decades, to the point where they now show worse upward mobility than either Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes — a reversal of the historical pattern, given that Scheduled Tribes tend to live in more remote and rural areas.
  • Daughters across all of these disadvantaged groups showed persistently lower mobility than sons, with little convergence over time — a finding that echoes Stanworth’s and Hartmann’s warnings about how easily gender gets left out of standard mobility measurement.
• Taken together, this evidence supports treating education as a necessary but insufficient condition for closing mobility gaps: it has visibly expanded absolute opportunity in India without yet equalizing the relative chances that different social groups actually face.