Measuring men’s mobility over the past generation has been a relatively straightforward task. A majority of fathers and their sons entered and remained in the workforce, providing researchers with comparable data on income, wages, and earnings. But determining the mobility of women and the importance of their contributions to family economic security is more complicated. For example, comparing daughters’ earnings with those of their mothers could overestimate the daughters’ economic gains, because many more daughters work in the labor force than their mothers did a generation ago. Comparing daughters’ earnings with their fathers’ could underestimate the daughters’ gains because of gender differences, particularly in wages, work schedules, and employment sectors.

This research creates more accurate earnings comparisons between parent-child pairs by controlling for these demographic and labor market differences. First, hourly wage rates are compared across generations in order to understand changes in women’s pay, independent from the dramatic increases in women’s hours worked. Then daughters’ earnings are adjusted to match the work hours of their mothers to explore what daughters’ economic standing would be if women’s labor force participation had remained constant over a generation. Similarly aged fathers and sons are also included as points of comparison.

First, this research demonstrates that: (1) median hourly wages increased for both women and men compared with the previous generation, (2) daughters working full time contribute more than half of family incomes, strengthening financial security (although the extent of this contribution varies based on family structure), and (3) daughters’ higher hours worked are associated with increased rates of upward family earnings mobility, especially in the bottom and middle of the earnings distribution.

Women’s increased educational attainment, labor force participation, and wage premiums certainly have contributed to families’ ability to out-earn the previous generation. Among the daughters’ generation, when both spouses have college degrees and higher wage rates and work more hours per week, family incomes are significantly higher.

In the case of couples, however, both the labor force participation and the earning status of men remain the primary drivers of movement up the income ladder. When using a model that considers the educational and labor force contributions of both men and women within couples today, men’s higher wage rates were the most important factor predicting higher family incomes. In fact, men’s wage rates were nearly twice as important as those of their female partners for boosting family income.

This paper uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which allows for the income, earnings, and wealth of real parent and child pairs to be compared at the same ages. In the parent generation, the analysis sample is restricted to families in which the head of household had a child younger than 18 in 1968 and had valid income and earnings measures for at least three years of data. In the child generation, the analysis sample is restricted to those who were heads of their households from 2001 to 2009.