This study investigates the impact of self-esteem during childhood on men’s and women’s occupational prestige in young adulthood. By combining first-hand information from parents in the Swedish Level-of-Living surveys (LNU) 2000 and their children in the Child-LNU in 2000 and the follow-up study in LNU-2010, we are able to assess how self-esteem during adolescence is related to occupational prestige in adulthood. Multivariate analyses were used to determine whether associations between self-esteem (global and domain-specific) in childhood (aged 10–18 years) and occupational prestige in young adulthood (aged 20–28) exist and, if so, what the magnitudes of these associations are for each respective gender.

For women, there is a positive association between confidence in mathematics and prestige, even when accounting for actual math grades. Global self-esteem is positively related to later occupational prestige as well. For men, self-esteem is unrelated to occupational prestige. Only actual performance in mathematics is important for men’s occupational achievements.

These results indicate the importance of taking gender differences into account when investigating how self-esteem is related to outcomes in young adulthood. A possible implication is the importance of focusing on the development of self-esteem among children, particularly girls, in school.

Using Swedish registry data, we study the chances of mobility into the Swedish labour market elite for men who graduated in the years 1985-2005. The elite is defined as top earners within mid- and large sized firms and within the public sector organisations (henceforth, we use organisation for both firms and public organisations). Using discrete time event history models, we study the incidence of elite entry in terms of external recruitment and internal promotion. The choice of field of study and of college or university are important, as are personality and, to a limited extent, cognitive ability. What is most striking is that having kin in elite positions increases the chance of elite entry in general, and having parents in top positions in the same organisation increases the likelihood of internal promotion. In sum, elite entry among college-educated males is associated with a diversity of factors, suggesting that complex explanations for labour market success should be considered, where skills, personality, and family ties all seem to matter.

Using data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey (2000, 2010), we investigate how the gender wage gap varies with occupational prestige and family status and also examine the extent to which this gap is explained by time-consuming working conditions. In addition, we investigate whether there is an association between parenthood, job characteristics and wage (as differentiated by gender). The analyses indicate that there are gender differences regarding prestige-based pay-offs among parents that are partly explained by fathers' greater access to employment characterized by time-consuming conditions. Separate analyses for men and women demonstrate the presence of a marriage wage premium for both genders, although only men have a parenthood wage premium. This fatherhood premium is however only present in high-prestigious occupations. Compared with childless men, fathers are also more advantaged in terms of access to jobs with time-consuming working conditions, but the wage gap between fathers and childless men is not explained by differences in access to such working conditions.

As physical inactivity may track from adolescence to adulthood, it is important to identify social determinants of physical inactivity in early life. However, most studies have measured socioeconomic position as one dimension. We examine whether multiple dimensions of socioeconomic position, in addition to other dimensions of inequality (i.e., gender, immigrant background), associate with physical inactivity at two time points in youth. Longitudinal data were drawn from the Swedish Level of Living Survey (N = 765) and analysed by gender-stratified logistic regression. Among girls, low parental social class (odds ratio [OR] = 2.63, 95% confidence interval [CI; 1.28, 5.42]) and income (OR = 2.28, 95% [CI 1.12, 4.65]) were associated with physical inactivity, while immigrant background (OR = 2.33, 95% CI [1.03, 5.23]) and a low level of parental education (OR = 3.38, 95% CI [1.15, 9.95]) predicted physical inactivity among women. Among boys, low parental income (OR = 3.27, 95% CI [1.39, 7.69]) was associated with physical inactivity, whereas immigrant background (OR = 2.29, 95% CI [1.04, 5.03]) predicted physical inactivity among men. Our results suggest that physical inactivity is socially patterned, but different dimensions of social stratification should not be considered interchangeable as they may operate independently, through intersection with gender, and at different time points in youth in increasing the risk of physical inactivity.

The quantitative scholarship on domestic labor has documented the existence of a gender gap in its performance in all countries for which data are available. Only recently have researchers begun to analyze economic disparities among women in their time spent doing housework, and their studies have been largely limited to the U.S. We extend this line of inquiry using data from two European countries, the former West Germany and Sweden. We estimate the economic gap in women's housework time, which we define as the difference between the time spent by women at the lowest and highest deciles of their own earnings. We expect this gap to be smaller in Sweden given its celebrated success at reducing both gender and income inequality. Though Swedish women do spend less time on domestic labor, however, and though there is indeed less earnings inequality among them, the economic gap in their housework is only a little smaller than among women in the former West Germany. In both places, a significant negative association between women's individual earnings and their housework time translates into economic gaps of more than 2.5 hours per week. Moreover, in both countries, women at the highest earnings decile experience a gender gap in housework that is smaller by about 4 hours per week compared to their counterparts at the lowest decile.