Who Gets to Use the Ladder?

The French flow mechanism is aggregate, but access to its pathways is not. This chapter asks who can enter routine work, upgrade into abstract work, or return to employment after a spell away, using education, tenure, and gender as indicators of unequal transition probabilities. The practical judgment is deliberately modest: these characteristics help reveal who is selected into each flow, but the estimates are associations rather than proof that changing one characteristic would produce a particular outcome.

The rise of abstract work is not a college-only story

A quick look at the French occupational distribution might suggest that abstract employment grows because more college-educated workers occupy it. Education does matter. College workers have much higher per-person probabilities of upgrading from routine to abstract work. But that is not the same as saying that the aggregate rise of abstract employment is mainly a college story, or that non-college workers are absent from the upward ladder.

Among non-college workers, the routine share falls from 73.0% in 1984 to 59.6% in 2021. Their manual share rises from 16.7% to 24.4%, and their abstract share from 10.4% to 16.0%. This is the clearest U-shaped pattern in the French data. The college group looks different: its abstract share rises from 58.5% to 65.5%, its routine share falls from 37.2% to 30.8%, and its manual share is nearly flat, moving from 4.2% to 3.7%.

The aggregate routine decline is therefore concentrated within the non-college group, not simply produced by the population becoming more college educated. In the education-observed sample, a decomposition attributes roughly 72% of the routine decline to within-non-college reallocation. The rising college share contributes about 23%, and within-college reallocation about 5%. The precise shares depend on the sample and decomposition, but the direction is clear: the group often treated as a passive victim of polarization is central to the movement of the occupational distribution.

The flow evidence adds the more surprising qualification. Net routine-to-abstract upgrading among non-college workers is about 0.47 percentage points per year before 1994 and 0.45 afterward. It remains almost unchanged across the break. College workers upgrade faster per person—about 2.17 percentage points before 1994 and 0.98 afterward—but non-college workers account for roughly 76% of all net routine-to-abstract worker flows because the non-college population is much larger.

This is a denominator lesson. A group can have a lower individual transition probability and still contribute more transitions in total if it contains more people. Conversely, a group can have a high rate but account for fewer aggregate moves because its population is smaller. Confusing these two statements turns a description of aggregate reallocation into a false claim about who has the best individual prospects.

The entry-margin result also survives the education split. Among non-college workers, the routine share's change across the 1994 break is not caused by routine-to-abstract upgrading suddenly collapsing.