Previous research has shown that parents often have strong ethnicity-related school preferences, and it has been suggested that these preferences are consequential for the ethnic segregation of schools. In this article, we study all students enrolled in compulsory schooling in the Stockholm region during the years 2008 to 2017. Using a combination of statistical analyses of school choices and large-scale, empirically calibrated simulations, we investigate how preferences and opportunities jointly influence the students’ mobility between schools and the school segregation that their mobility or lack thereof gave rise to. Our main finding is that opportunities generally outweigh preferences. While ethnicity-related school preferences exist, they have little impact on ethnic segregation because the schools that students move between tend to have similar ethnic compositions.

Analytical Sociology (AS) is a branch of sociology concerned with mechanism-based explanations of collective outcomes and their dynamics—eg, segregation, inequality, and the diffusion of innovation. According to AS, a proper explanation must identify the social processes through which the collective outcomes to be explained are brought about. This typically requires explicit reference to the micro-level entities—individuals, families, firms, etc.—who are involved in the process, the activities they engage in, and the nature of the interdependencies that exist between them. The latter point deserves emphasis: Interdependence is a key feature of social systems that can have huge consequences for macro-level outcomes. When such interdependencies are at hand it is essential that explanations of macro-level outcomes detail how the interdependent activities bring about the collective outcome to be explained.

The segregation of labor markets along ethnic and gender lines is socially highly consequential, and the social science literature has long viewed homophily and network-based job recruitments as some of its most crucial drivers. Here, we focus on a previously unidentified mechanism, the Trojan-horse mechanism, which, in contradiction to the main tenet of previous research, suggests that network-based recruitment reduce rather than increase segregation levels. We identify the conditions under which networks are desegregating, and using unique data on all individuals and all workplaces located in the Stockholm region during the years 2000–2017, we find strong empirical evidence for the Trojan-horse mechanism and its role in the gender segregation of labor markets.

The segregation of labor markets along ethnic and gender lines is socially highly consequential, and the social science literature has long viewed homophily and network-based job recruitments as some of its most crucial drivers. Here, we focus on a previously unidentified mechanism, the Trojan-horse mechanism, which, in contradiction to the main tenet of previous research, suggests that network-based recruitment reduce rather than increase segregation levels. We identify the conditions under which networks are desegregating, and using unique data on all individuals and all workplaces located in the Stockholm region during the years 2000–2017, we find strong empirical evidence for the Trojan-horse mechanism and its role in the gender segregation of labor markets.