"You in 1905" is an attempt to give an indication of what people might have been doing if they had lived around one hundred years ago.

The occupational order has changed dramatically over the last 100 years. Not only are there many new kinds of jobs, but there has been a major shift away from unskilled manual work towards more administrative and professional jobs. Making comparisons between the two periods is very difficult.

In order to be able to decide what kinds of occupations would have been comparable to particular occupations today, what we have done is to divide present-day occupations into ten equal-sized groups ("deciles") on the basis of their CAMSIS (www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/CAMSIS/index.html) scores. These can be taken as representing the level of "general advantage" enjoyed by holders of each occupation. We have selected several of the more numerous occupations within each group to represent it and to give an idea of its composition. Using a historical version of CAMSIS, we have similarly divided occupations held in the period 1890-1910.

If a present-day job falls into a particular decile, we can suggest what occupations came into the equivalent decile around 1900. So, for example, jobs in the top ten percent nowadays are matched with jobs in the top ten per cent in 1900, those in the range 21 - 30 per cent now are matched with those in the same range then, and so on.

Why did you ask for father"s occupation?
"You in 1905" is based on the premise that in 1905 a person would have been born into a set of social circumstances, which to a large extent, would have determined their lives. So by taking the user"s father"s occupation, we have tried to suggest a possible occupation of the user in 1905, given this research.

Important Notes

• There are obvious inaccuracies and difficulties with "You in 1905", such as:
  
• Defining "occupation" is difficult. For the purposes of "You in 1905" we have also had to limit the number of occupations.
• For the purposes of our quiz, we have shown women"s occupation across the scales to give an idea of the type of employment. However, only 50% of women worked and so "You in 1905" is not representative of the number of women who did not work at all.
• There has been an enormous change in the occupational structure. In terms of the normal distribution, nowadays there is a skew upwards, 100 years ago there was a skew downwards. That means that a ten percent slice of the higher groups will cover a narrower range of scores now than 100 years ago; conversely a ten percent slice of the lower groups would have covered a narrower range of scores then than now.