Life Chances
What Are Life Chances?
Life chances is a concept associated with Max Weber. It refers to the probability that a person will enjoy the positive outcomes that a society has to offer — good health, educational success, secure employment, satisfactory housing and a long life expectancy. Weber argued that class position shapes life chances because it determines a person’s position in the market. In the UK, however, life chances are not determined by class alone. Research consistently shows that gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, age, disability, religion and belief all intersect with class to shape what individuals can realistically expect from life.
The spec identifies seven factors affecting life chances: social class, gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, age, disability, and religion and belief. Each can independently and in combination with others shape a person’s access to education, employment, health and other valued resources.
Social Class and Life Chances
Social class remains one of the strongest predictors of life outcomes in the UK. Children from professional and managerial backgrounds are significantly more likely to attend higher-performing schools, obtain higher-education qualifications and enter well-paid occupations than those from working-class backgrounds. They tend to have better health outcomes and longer life expectancy. This is partly explained by material deprivation — working-class families may have fewer financial resources to invest in education, private healthcare or extracurricular activities. It is also explained by cultural and social capital: the values, knowledge and social networks that enable middle-class families to navigate educational systems more effectively.
Social mobility — the ability to change one’s position in the class hierarchy — is relevant here. Intergenerational mobility describes movement across generations (a working-class child reaching a professional occupation). Intragenerational mobility describes movement within a single lifetime. Functionalists see upward social mobility as evidence that the system is working meritocratically; Marxists argue that structural barriers mean mobility is limited and class position is substantially reproduced across generations.
Devine and the Affluent Worker
Fiona Devine’s study Affluent Workers Revisited (1992) directly addressed how class shapes life chances by returning to the site of an earlier study. In the 1960s, Goldthorpe and Lockwood studied male manual workers at the Vauxhall car plant in Luton to test the claim that affluent workers were becoming embourgeoisified — absorbed into middle-class values and lifestyles as wages rose. They rejected that claim. The workers kept a separate working-class outlook. They also proposed the concept of privatised instrumentalism — social relationships focused on the home, with work valued only as a means to earn wages.
Devine revisited Luton in the late 1980s, interviewing manual workers and their wives. She did not find evidence of full embourgeoisement: workers’ lifestyles were neither as communal as traditional working-class communities nor as home-centred and privatised as Goldthorpe and Lockwood had suggested. Crucially, Devine found that her respondents retained a strong sense of class identity and resentment at extreme inequality, even though many aspired to consumer goods and rising living standards. Many had also lost faith in the Labour Party to deliver greater equality. Devine’s study illustrates that class continues to shape attitudes, aspirations and life chances even among relatively well-paid workers.
Gender: Women in the UK continue to earn less on average than men — the gender pay gap persists across most sectors. Women are over-represented in part-time and low-paid work. Feminist sociologists link this to patriarchal structures that undervalue women’s labour and create barriers to senior positions (the “glass ceiling”). Life expectancy is longer for women, but women are more likely to experience poverty in old age due to lower pension accumulation.
Race and ethnicity: Ethnic minority groups in the UK face, on average, higher unemployment rates, lower wages, and over-representation in lower-status occupations compared with White British groups. However, outcomes vary considerably between different ethnic groups and are shaped by a combination of factors: direct discrimination, institutional racism, differences in geographic concentration, educational background and cultural capital. Sociologists are careful to explain ethnic inequalities using sociological mechanisms rather than treating ethnicity as inherently predictive of outcomes.
Age: Life chances vary across the life course. Young people may face higher unemployment and are less likely to own their own homes. Older workers, especially those over fifty, can face ageism in the labour market. Elderly people on fixed incomes may be vulnerable to poverty, and access to healthcare and social care becomes increasingly important.
Sexuality: LGBTQ+ individuals face higher rates of mental health difficulties, discrimination in employment and housing, and social exclusion in some contexts. Attitudes and legal protections have changed significantly in the UK since the 1960s, but inequalities in life chances persist.
Disability: Disabled people in the UK have significantly lower employment rates and, on average, lower incomes than non-disabled people. The disability employment gap reflects both barriers to access and employer discrimination. Social models of disability argue that these inequalities are produced by social barriers and attitudes rather than by disability itself.
Religion and belief: Religious identity can affect life chances through discrimination, social capital (religious communities can provide supportive networks) and cultural expectations around education and employment. Some religious groups are associated with higher educational attainment; others face Islamophobia or other forms of prejudice in the labour market.
Functionalists, following Davis and Moore, would argue that differential life chances reflect differential rewards for positions of varying functional importance. If some people have better life chances, this is partly because they have worked harder, trained longer or demonstrated greater talent — consistent with a meritocratic system. Social mobility is evidence the system is working.
Marxists argue that life chances are shaped fundamentally by class position, which is determined by ownership of the means of production. Material deprivation, restricted access to education and the reproduction of ruling-class ideology all ensure that class inequality in life chances is reproduced across generations. The system is not meritocratic but serves the interests of the bourgeoisie.
Feminist sociologists argue that patriarchy creates systematic inequalities in life chances for women across all class positions. Even women in professional occupations face the gender pay gap and the glass ceiling. Walby’s framework of six structures of patriarchy (developed further in Lesson 6) helps explain why gender inequality in life chances persists despite formal legal equality.
Devine’s 1992 study found that affluent workers had NOT become embourgeoisified: they retained class identities, resented extreme inequality, and had not become as privatised and home-centred as the earlier Goldthorpe and Lockwood study had suggested.