Women ruling the roost at social ladder

London, Jan 13 (UNI) Women are giving stiff competition to people from mars when it comes to ruling the roost at social ladder.

The factors--slow rate of growth for top jobs and increasing number of women pursuing careers, have made it difficult for men to climb up the social ladder.

According to a research by Oxford University, despite official reforms to promote ''equality of opportunity'', prospects for men are ''not as good as they once were'' and thus upward social mobility has come to a halt in Britain.

Social mobility is defined as the degree to which an individual's social status changes throughout the course of his life through a system of social hierarchy or stratification. It is also the degree to which that individual's descendants move up and down the class system.

The study done by John Goldthorpe and Michelle Jackson found that 75 per cent of the men and women surveyed ended up in a different social class to their parents 30 years later.

However, only 45 per cent of those born in 1958 were ''upwardly mobile'' by 1988, and the statistics fell to 42 per cent in 2000 in case of the people born in 1970s.

Surprisingly, the numbers of ''downwardly mobile'' males increased slightly as against women with little change, the Daily Telegraph reported today.

Commenting on the changes, the researchers said, ''For the first time for men we are getting a situation where upward mobility is falling off and downward mobility is increasing.'' ''Since the 1990s, growth in managerial jobs has slackened off.

There's still growth but at a slower rate and for everyone who moves up, someone must move down because the top jobs are not expanding in number at the same rate. There is also increasing competition for managerial jobs from women,'' Dr Goldthorpe noted.

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