🔎 What This Paper Asks

Extensive literature links cultural conflict to stagnant social mobility but largely centers on men. Upwardly mobile women are often cast as progressive winners in knowledge-based societies, yet their perceptions and politics are understudied. This paper asks how women view their individual and collective trajectories and how those views relate to expectations about future opportunities and political attitudes.

📊 Survey Evidence From Four West European Countries

• Uses survey data collected in four West European countries to compare men’s and women’s views of mobility, future opportunities, and political preferences.
• Focuses on intergenerational upward mobility at the individual level and on perceived collective momentum among women as distinct predictors of attitudes.

🔍 Key Findings

• Individual upward intergenerational mobility is associated with more positive perceptions of future opportunity.
• That positive link is not stronger for women than for men and does not translate into especially progressive political attitudes among upwardly mobile women.
• A different pattern emerges for perceptions of collective movement: women who share a sense of upward collective momentum are more likely to demand additional measures to secure gender equality.
• Men—including those who perceive themselves as upwardly mobile—may recognize women’s collective gains yet are more inclined to accept a still male-dominated status quo.

💡 Why It Matters

• Distinguishes individual mobility experiences from shared perceptions of collective progress, showing that collective narratives matter more for mobilizing gender-equality demands among women.
• Challenges assumptions that individual economic advancement among women automatically produces broader progressive politics.
• Offers a nuanced view of how gendered perceptions of mobility shape demands for policy change in contemporary Western Europe.