Olga Salido Cortés

Olga Salido Cortés is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid and holds the Spanish national accreditation for Full Professor. Her research focuses on social inequality, gender, labour markets and welfare states in comparative perspective. She has extensive experience in international academic collaboration and currently serves as Vice‑President for International Affairs of the Spanish Sociological Federation. Her work combines quantitative and comparative methods to analyse social mobility and the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.

The project

Title: Gendered Social Mobility and the "Social Elevator": Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage across Cohorts in Spain and France (2005–2023)

"This project investigates whether social fluidity understood as the net strength of the association between individuals’ class origins and their class destinations has declined across successive birth cohorts exposed to major economic shocks. A central contribution of the project is the incorporation of a gender perspective: it examines whether origin-based penalties operate differently for women and men, and whether these patterns have shifted across historical contexts. To address these questions, the project analyses cohort change in intergenerational social mobility and the persistence of socio-economic disadvantage, with a primary focus on Spain and France and a selective extension to a small group of additional EU countries. The analysis compares cohorts entering adulthood before and after the Great Recession and the COVID-19 crisis, two critical junctures that may have reshaped the structure of opportunities and the mechanisms through which class and gender shape life chances. In this sense, the project engages with the broader public debate about a potentially “blocked” social elevator, but does so through a structural, class-based analysis of intergenerational mobility. This perspective moves beyond the currently dominant focus on parent–child income elasticity as the primary indicator of opportunity, which tends to narrow the analysis to monetary transmission and to orient interpretations toward individualistic and meritocratic accounts of social inequality."

Hosting institution: Centre de Recherche sur les Inégalités Sociales (CRIS) - Sciences Po

Selective Bibliography

• Salido, O. (2026). Assessing the role of welfare states in reducing inequality (2008–2023). In V. Fortunato et al. (Eds.), Public Policies and Social Inequalities in Transformation: Comparative Insights from Europe and Latin America. Franco Angeli.
• Salido, O. (in press). Equal Pay Policies in Spain: An Unfinished Journey into Gender Transformation? In I. Engeli & A. Mazur (Eds.), Policy When Implementation Stalls. Oxford University Press.
• Salido Cortés, O. (2025). El ascensor social funciona, pero a distintas velocidades. Panorama Social, 42, 29–36.
• Bustelo, M., & Salido, O. (2024). Gender biases in the evaluation of knowledge transfer. Evaluation and Program Planning, 104, 102432.