Gender, education expansion and intergenerational educational mobility around the world

The extent to which people’s social status is associated with their parents’ status has far-reaching implications for the openness of and stratification in society. Whereas most research focused on the father-child association in advanced economies, less is known about the role mothers play in intergenerational mobility, particularly in a global context. We assembled a dataset of 1.79 million individuals born in 1956–1990 across 106 societies to examine the global patterns of intergenerational educational mobility and how they vary with education expansion and changes in parents’ educational pairing. With education expansion, father-child associations in educational status become weaker and mother-child associations become stronger. With the prevalence of hypogamous parents (mother more educated), mother-child associations are stronger, but father-child associations are weaker. With the prevalence of hypergamous parents (father more educated), mother-daughter associations are weaker. Our global evidence calls for a gender-sensitive understanding of how education expansion matters for intergenerational mobility. Against the backdrop of the world expansion of education and changes in parents’ educational pairing patterns, Hu and Qian provide global evidence on the importance of gender and the mother in intergenerational educational mobility.