News and Updates

Discrimination harassment and violence: the experiences of LGBT communities

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In Episode 15 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast we’re discussing LGBT discrimination, harassment and violence. Our guests are Sait Bayrakdar from Kings College London and Andrew King from the University of Surrey who, as part of DIAL’s CILIA project have been using a large cross national survey to look at the experiences of nearly 29,000 people living in Germany the UK and Portugal. LGBT discrimination, harassment and violence in Germany, Portugal and the UK: A quantitative comparative approach is research by Sait Bayrakdar and Andrew King and is published in the journal Current Sociology.

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In this episode, we’re discussing LGBT discrimination, harassment and violence. Our guests are Sait Bayrakdar from King’s College London and Andrew King from the University of Surrey, who, as part of DIAL’s CILIA project have been using a large cross-national survey to look at the experiences of nearly 29,000 people living in Germany, the UK and Portugal. I asked Andrew first to talk us through the background to the research.

Andrew King  0:30 

This piece of research is part of the larger CILIA LGBTQI project, which has been exploring inequalities across the lives of LGBTQI people in four European countries – England, Scotland, Germany, and Portugal. We had a large research team from four different institutions on the project. And they brought expertise from different disciplines, as well as different methodologies. So the main aims of the CILIA project were to study LGBTQI inequalities from an intersectional and lifecourse perspective and bring some comparative dimensions to this. We started with a literature review and survey mapping exercise, which helped us document what had been done so far in the area, then we went on to analyse various sources of data, as well as collecting a large qualitative data set from LGBTQI individuals in the four countries. But this research article reports on the research, which was a part of our quantitative strand.

Christine Garrington  1:43 

Okay, that’s great. Thanks Andrew. I’m going to come back to you a little bit later in our discussion for your sort of reflections on what was was found. But Sait you were the lead author on this, and what was it specifically that you wanted to try to get to grips with and why in this particular paper?

Sait Bayrakdar  1:58 

We were aware from our qualitative research that despite over 10 years of equality legislation, issue of discrimination, harassment, and violence we’re still very significant to LGBT people, but we wanted to look at this both quantitatively and cross nationally. In a nutshell, we were mainly interested in understanding the patterns of discrimination, harassment and violence experienced by LGBT individuals in these countries. But this was quite tricky, because most survey studies still do not collect information about sexual orientation or gender identity. And it is even more difficult to find an international study that collects data from individuals across different countries. One exception to this was the LGBT survey conducted by the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency. And this data allowed us to do a comparative analysis across the countries in the CILIA project. In fact, this really was the on the Pan-European data set that spoke to these inequalities. Also, we wanted to document the diverse experiences and patterns within LGB and T communities. Partly because of data limitations, and small numbers in surveys, these different groups are often merged in a single category as LGBT. Although their experiences differ quite a lot. And our results also come from these differences. Qualitative researchers are quite ahead in this regard. And they have done amazing studies showing the diversity in experiences and outcomes. We hope this research will help us show these differences quantitatively and highlight the need for better survey data collection that allows researchers to study LGBTQI plus lives in this way.

Andrew King  3:37 

So although we, there were four countries involved, actually, the dataset just puts everybody into a UK group. So we couldn’t separate out England and Scotland. And the other thing is that the dataset doesn’t include specific questions relevant for intersex people either. So we weren’t able to include intersex people in the quantitative analysis that we did.

Christine Garrington  4:01 

Okay, yeah, understood. Now, what sorts of things were people asked about in the Fundamental Rights Agency survey then Sait? It just sounds, it sounds a really useful resource for this.

Sait Bayrakdar  4:12 

Yes, absolutely. So the respondents were asked about many things, including their demographic data and social identities, their experiences of discrimination or other kinds of unfair treatment, whether they report these incidents, whether they change their behaviour in public to avoid discrimination. They are also asked about their views about equality policies and their relationships with people they interact in their daily lives. It’s quite a rich study, and I believe it is terribly under used by researchers. In this research, we looked at LGBT individuals experiences of discrimination, harassment and violence, and the survey was asking whether they had experienced any of these as a result of the person’s sexual orientation and gender identity. We looked at how these differences differ for LGBT individuals separately, and how their social background affects their likelihood of experiencing this incidence.

Christine Garrington  5:07 

Yeah and large numbers of people took part in this survey as well. So, Sait let’s dig a bit deeper now and move on to you know what everybody is interested to hear about, which is what you actually found – can you talk us through that?

Sait Bayrakdar  5:20 

Sure. So earlier, I said that we were interested in bringing forward the diverse experiences within and between LGBT individuals, and between different countries. And I can confidently say that we found out that there are quite striking differences across LGB, and T individuals. First of all, in all countries, trans individuals are more at risk of experiencing negative incidents of discrimination, harassment and violence. Compared to their cisgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual counterparts. This is perhaps not surprising for many, but this wasn’t explored quantitatively previously in an academic study. And another interesting finding for me was that different groups were more prone to experience different kinds of negative incidents. For example, lesbians seem more at risk of discrimination and harassment, and gay men are more at risk of violence. We do not know why this is the case. But there is definitely an observable gender pattern here. And my feeling is that this might be related to the ways these identities may be seen as a threat to masculinity. And I think we should definitely need more research to look at these intersections of sexuality, gender, and maybe also other, other social identities.

Christine Garrington  6:38 

Yeah, some really, really interesting and important findings emerging here. And was the story the same across all of the three countries that you, you looked at?

Sait Bayrakdar  6:47 

Not quite. In the first instance, all three countries showed similar patterns in the likelihood of experiencing these incidents across different groups. In all countries, reports of discrimination and harassment were more common than reports of violence and trans individuals were more likely to experience all three forms of negative incidents but there were some interesting differences when we dug deeper. For example, the rates of violence are higher in the UK, which begs the question why the UK is less able to protect these individuals despite being a front runner in equality legislation? Perhaps another thing is that the reports of violence are particularly high for trans individuals and gay men in the UK. These two groups in the UK are more likely to experience violence than those in Germany and Portugal. And I think this suggests that contextual factors may be shaping some part of these experiences or the likelihood of experiencing these incidents. This is something that comparative data can help us understand a bit better.

Christine Garrington  7:47 

Okay, Sait so was there anything else at play? Any other factors that we should take into account or that you took into account that were important or relevant?

Sait Bayrakdar  7:55 

Yeah, so we included quite a few other variables relating to social identities and individual characteristics. I think the most important but perhaps not so unexpected finding was that those who have greater socioeconomic resources are less likely to experience these negative incidents. And this implies that class based social inequalities may have a role here as well. So for example, a more economically advantaged person may be able to protect themselves a bit better, whereas other less advantaged might unfortunately, be more vulnerable to such incidents. We found this effect to varying degrees in all countries. I think this is very important because it points out that intersections of class, sexuality and gender identity are creating unique experiences. Depending on one is positioned across different social demographics, the likelihood of experiencing negative incidents change. We also find that LGBT individuals with disabilities and minority ethnic or religious backgrounds are more likely to experience discrimination. It is really very important that we create more empirical evidence on these intersections looking at different life outcomes, not only discrimination, harassment and violence, but maybe also the outcomes of education, labour markets, and other domains of life.

Christine Garrington  9:15 

Yeah, no, absolutely understood. Now, what would you say then say, Sait that we take away from all of this in an era where, you know, many people assume or think, believe that discrimination on the grounds of sexuality and identity as somehow a thing of the past? I mean, your your research tells us otherwise?

Sait Bayrakdar  9:32 

And this is a very interesting question, which I also find difficult to answer. I think there has been an immense advancement in the equality legislation in the UK, as well as the other countries in our research. And public attitudes have also progressed significantly in recent years. And I think maybe, possibly because of these recent changes, some people may think that the struggle has now been won, and equality has been achieved. However, having legislation is one thing and putting it in effect is another. LGBT individuals still experience discrimination in their day-to-day lives, and the things heterosexual cisgender individuals take for granted are usually not available or accessible to the same extent to LGBT people. And I think that is because the norms and cultures in workplaces, social lives, families are shaped by cis-heteronormativity. So I think those with lived experiences have a better understanding of discrimination and whether or not it is a thing of past.

Christine Garrington  10:33 

And on that note, do you have any thoughts on the implications of all of this for, for policy, especially around efforts to promote greater equality, and diversity, you know, wherever we’re at in the world, but particularly in these countries.

Sait Bayrakdar  10:47 

In this piece we provide quantitative evidence for many issues scholars have been discussing for a while. And we do this by providing further original comparative evidence, we knew that the discrimination, harassment and violence was there. But for me, the most important take home lesson is that there are country differences in the likelihood of experiencing these incidents. And we see that violence is more likely in the UK, particularly for trans individuals. We do not test the effect of potential factors, but our study does show that trans individuals are more more vulnerable to these attacks. So I think policy should really prioritise this. Trans rights have become a very heated topic for some years now. I must say, I think the way trans rights are discussed in the UK is not helping. As a policy priority the government and other policymakers should prioritise addressing trans people’s very immediate needs and ensure that everyone regardless of their gender identity is protected from discrimination, harassment and violence. And another issue. Police documents don’t always take account of diversity in terms of gender identity, sexual orientation, or variations in sex characteristics and intersex status. They often assume that LGBTQI plus communities are a homogeneous group, despite their characteristics and needs being quite different. I think there should be more engagement from policymakers with communities themselves, so they can see that they are working with diversity and difference. This should also take account of differences related to other social backgrounds, such as education, class, ethnicity, disability, religion, and possibly any other significant difference that people may feel or identify with.

Christine Garrington  12:30 

Yeah, thank you Sait for those really interesting reflections. And Andrew, I wonder if there’s anything that you’d like to add to that?

Andrew King  12:36 

Yeah, an overall recommendation from the CILIA project is the need for intersectional policymaking. So policies tend to address people as single subjects and adopt a one size fits all approach, which in a way, erases differences. And as we’ve demonstrated in our article from an intersectional lifecourse perspective, this is really problematic. This means that we need policymaking that focuses on multiple and contextual marginalities as well as inclusions and exclusions and how privilege and oppression are created in multiple ways. So not recognising this intersectional diversity in policymaking, or perhaps only doing so in limited ways means people who embody the intersections of different and multiple marginalities get overlooked. So while some policies need to be specific, they should also recognise intersections. And we very much hope that our article and the wider CILIA project contributes to a new policy agenda in this respect.

Christine Garrington  13:46 

“LGBT discrimination, harassment and violence in Germany, Portugal and the UK. A quantitative comparative approach” is research by Sait Bayrakdar and Andrew King, and is published in the journal Current Sociology. You can find out more on the DIAL website at dynamicsofinequality.org. And don’t forget to subscribe to the DIAL podcast to access earlier and forthcoming episodes. Thanks for listening to this episode of the DIAL podcast which was presented and produced by me Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts.

Golfing with Trump: who does it and what does it mean for rising populism?

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In Episode 14 of Series 3 of our podcast, we talk with Professor Andrés Rodríguez-Pose from the London School of Economics about his research looking at who propelled Donald Trump to power and what the future holds for populist politicians, politics and policies?

 

Transcript 

Christine Garrington  0:01 

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In this episode, we’re discussing the rise of populism in the US with Andres Rodriguez-Pose at the London School of Economics. He has been asking the intriguing question of who exactly propelled Donald Trump to power and what the future holds for populist politicians, politics and policies?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  0:25

I’ve always been interested in populism and the rise of populism. And I do it feel that many of the explanations of why people vote for, let’s say, anti-system parties and anti-system options, were probably not the most adequate. Of many voters of populism have been considered to be uneducated, poor, rural and white men. And very often, it has been said that we just have to wait for these people to die and then the problem will sort itself out. I think that’s first macabre and not a joke. And second, I do feel that that is also wrong. Because the people that are voting for anti-system parties, both in the US and in Europe, probably have got and certainly have got you know grievances that are related very often, to the long-term economic, social, cultural, and surface decline of the places where they live. But urban elites have tended and political elites have had a tendency to tell them that they are rednecks, that they are despicable, that they live in flyover states and in places where there’s no opportunity, and the best solution for them is just to get on their bikes and move to a place where there’s opportunity, which mainly means the big cities in from that perspective,

Christine Garrington  1:48

Indeed, and so what was it about Trump’s election and obviously near re-election, that you wanted to sort of hone in on and look at specifically and why?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  1:57

Trump, in my view, represented from his arrival, a threat to democracy and to American democracy that traditionally was the beacon of democracy across the world. It also represented the radicalization of the Republican Party that had been traditionally mainstream. And for me, that was really interesting trying to understand what had driven voters in certain parts of the US to vote for Trump, especially in the light of what Robert Putnam, probably the best known political scientist in the world from Harvard University, had written 20 years ago, well in 2000, about the potential threats. to threats to American democracy, which was where coming from, on the one hand, the rise of inequality in the US a country that is far more polarised interpersonally than Europe, but where territorial disparities are significantly lower. And the other challenge, which was the parallel declines since the 1970s, and 1980s of what is he called social capital, which is the sense of interaction, community, and cohesion within localities and within American cities, towns and rural areas.

Christine Garrington  3:15

Now you went about this by carrying out an econometric analysis. For those of us who might not sort of immediately understand what that looks like, in reality, I wonder if you can tell us what you actually did?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  3:25 

Well, I wanted to explain what is known as the Trump margin. So the additional votes that Donald Trump received in 2016, and then in 2020, relative to the votes that a perfectly mainstream Republican candidate in the 2012 election, like Mitt Romney had received. So trying to explain the additional extra percentages of votes in specific counties in the US on the basis of a series of factors I thought, and my co-authors thought that the additional vote for Trump was very much related to economic and demographic decline in particular parts of the US, but also I introduce, we introduced a number of what we call controls, which are the factors that either from political science or economics, or sociology have been regarded as the main drivers of the swing and the vote for Trump. And these are mainly related to individual characteristics, what I said before – levels of education, age and ethnicity of the voters in the case of the US, but also related to the places where they live. And there has been a lot of work that has highlighted the divide in the vote in the vote between big cities in the United States and small towns and rural communities.

Christine Garrington  4:49

So what did you find then when you looked at the types of communities that it was thought propelled Donald Trump into into the presidency? What did you find there?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  4:57 

Well we started with a hypothesis launch by Robert Putnam in 2000, about the idea that the threat to American democracy and therefore the vote for an extreme outsider like Donald Trump was coming from, on the one hand interpersonal inequality and the decline of social communities. What we thought is that just by looking anecdotally, at what had happened in the US that it was not the poorest of the poor, or the richest of the rich that were voting or voted in 2016 for Donald Trump. In fact, they voted together for Hillary Clinton, whereas it was mainly people living in declining communities, in places that had been seeing that people leave, jobs go, that their salaries were being depressed, etc. Those were the ones that were casting the vote. So our hypothesis was clear. It was not interpersonal inequality, and declining social capital, it was probably long-term economic decline in places that were still relatively cohesive. And this is what we found that on the whole, a country with strong interpersonal inequalities, the vote for anti-system candidates in this case, Donald Trump was not related to huge salary polarisation, although this might explode in the future. It was mainly related to long-term economic decline, in the form of loss of employment, but also to long-term demographic decline in the form of loss of population. By contrast, we saw no connection between declining wages and declining salaries and vote for Donald Trump.

Christine Garrington  6:41 

Really interesting. And now, it’s also been said that the global financial crisis of 2008 was was a key driver. Did your research support that or not?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  6:52

Yes, we’ve done the research for every decade. So economic decline since the 1970s, until 2016 and 2020. The dates of the elections that we look at. 1980 to those years 1990, 2000 and 2010. Until then, and the 2008 financial crisis is the fuse, it’s probably the last drop that actually made the glass on the water overflow, in places where that were very hard hit by the crisis in places where they have seen the loss of jobs accelerated to, for example, competition by trade, mainly coming from China. Those are the places where the switch from Mitt Romney to Donald Donald Trump, where the Trump margin increase the most those are the places that actually led to Trump winning the vote. But having said that, this is a far, far longer decline. That is there, we find evidence that for every single decade that we control all the way back to 1970, that in all cases, the decline in local population and decline in local employment is positively and significantly correlated, to more votes for Donald Trump.

Christine Garrington  8:05 

Okay, and what other key things emerge that you think, you know, really might be important in these years where we’re looking back on we’re living through still this incredibly intense period of American politics and European politics, global politics, and what what is played out?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  8:22

We saw the events of the 6th of January 2021 and the risk it has represented to democracy. But we have seen in the case of the UK, that something that is, probably hasn’t happened for centuries, like proroguing Parliament took place without virtually everyone batting an eyelid. We’re seeing how countries like Hungary, and Poland are moving away or drifting away from democracy. So what we have is a really, really serious threat to a system that with all its problems, and it’s needed of reform has generated greater prosperity, greater equality. And I would say in the last 70 years in the developed world, the longest period of peace we have ever experienced. So with all its flaws, is probably by far the best system that we have. That what these anti-system let’s call them populist politicians are offering might be apparently simple solutions, but in reality are far more dangerous and likely to just exacerbate polarisation and lead to conflict because these people feed on external enemies, whether real or imaginary. So there was a need for me to try to find potential solutions to this problem. And what has emerged from the research is that lack of opportunities, long-term economic decline, long-term demographic decline, long-term decline in service provisions to many communities in the US but also across most of Europe are at the root of the problem, we have a territorial problem. This is the situation we have, for example, in the UK where there, the need to level up is not just to reduce disparities, but mainly to tap on the potential of places that whether in America or in the north of the UK, for the past, where the motives of the US and the British economy and now are languishing mainly because of lack of political attention, but not just a lack of political attention, lack of belief, from political elites, and often from the population in big cities, but also from themselves, that they have got significant potential, and that this potential can be mobilised in order to lift their economies or lift their quality of life.

Christine Garrington  10:46

Some really important insights there, Andres, thank you. But I just wonder if we might finish by asking you whether you feel that the research tells us anything about what the future might hold in respect of continuing support for Trumpism and more populism and populist policies?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  11:02 

This is a deeply rooted problem, that it has been brewing for a very long time. And it requires sustained and serious policy solutions. We have seen in the situation in recent days in the UK with the publication of the levelling up white paper, that this has become centre stage of UK politics. But I do still feel that whether it is in the case of the UK, or in the case of the US or elsewhere in Europe, what we’re finding is that many decision makers are paying lip service to the idea that there’s a need to mobilise resources that there’s a need to invest in areas that have been declining that there’s a need on to tap on those resources. But in reality, there’s a strong lack of belief that place based, place sensitive policies that respond to local challenges, but also mobilise local needs local potential, they think they’re not going to work.

Christine Garrington  12:01 

And what from your point of view, would you say are the ramifications of continuing down that road?

Andres Rodriguez-Pose  12:06 

If we keep on doing this, we are in a situation where many people in our countries have said enough is enough, we have had enough of a system which seems to benefit someone else. And not us. That if we are asked to do let’s say, an environmental transition? Well, we have. And this is the situation in France, what has happened is that diesel fuel taxes have increased, and we were told 15 years ago that diesel was the future. And now our ageing diesel cars, we have to pay for it. Whereas the people living in Paris, for example, they have alternative transport, they’re richer so they can very often afford electrical cars. And we are paying for a transition that is driven by an urban elite that is aloof to our needs. If this is not addressed, these people have now have decided that they want to shake the tree and they want to shake it hard and they are doing it and they have found their champions. So if this is not done seriously I’m afraid, we might see that the prospect of a 2024 re-election of Donald Trump and it would be the first US president since Grover Cleveland to when non-successive terms, or someone of that ilk, either in the US or in many across parts of Europe and other parts of the world is likely to become something that is common. And in my view, that would be very dangerous for the reasons I said before. We have a system that is flawed, but a system that with all its flaws is far better than any of the alternative we have at the table.

Christine Garrington  13:45 

“Golfing with Trump. Social capital, decline, inequality, and the rise of populism in the US” is research by Andres Rodriguez-Pose, Neil Lee and Cornelius Lipp. It’s been produced as part of DIAL’s project Populism, Inequality and Institutions. You can find out more on the DIAL website at dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of the DIAL podcast, which was presented and produced by me Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts.

Work and family lives: Who has a chance of having it all?

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In Episode 6 of Series 2 of our podcast, we talk with Professor Anette Fasang from Humboldt University and Professor Silke Aisenbrey from Yeshiva University about their research looking at how inequality plays out in the parallel work and lives of black men and women in the United States.

Transcript

 

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In this series, we discuss findings from DIAL’s Equal Lives project, which looks at how inequality impacts the lives of young adults. Our guests are Anette Fasang and Silke Aisenbrey, they’ve been looking at the parallel work and family lives of black and white men and women aged 22 to 44 in the United States. I started by asking Anette to explain the background to their work.

Anette Fasang  0:27 

So recently, or for a longer while actually there has been quite a bit of talk about intersectional inequalities, so overlapping categories of inequality, very prominently, gender and race that we also look at in our paper. And here the ideas that black women, for example, face specific disadvantages that white women don’t, but that are also different from the challenges that, for example, black men face. And this is a type of our field of research that often works with qualitative data, for example, or is quite theoretical also activism oriented. And that’s actually not at all where Silke and I come from, we are more sort of quantitative statistics oriented people do inequality research in this area. But we found this new intersectionality approach extremely important, and tried to get sort of a quantitative what we call life course, perspective on intersectional inequalities. And for us, the life course perspective here is really important. Because when you think about differences between social groups, if you measure them at one point in time, for example, their incomes at age 30, you will, of course, find differences, and you’ll find inequality. But what we try to do is follow people really from age 20, to age 40, to see how different types of advantages and disadvantages accumulate, because what accumulates over the life course, tends to be much larger than disparities measured at any specific time point. And we think that’s particularly important when you’re trying to assess differences between social groups, to not understate the actual extent of disadvantages and advantages that people accumulate over time,

Silke Aisenbrey  2:17

Where we are coming from, it’s really to look at at the life of a person in terms of a movie, like understand it really, as this bigger concept and understand every step of the way, as a result of what happened before. Anette and I did like a big project where we did something similar, where we addressed similar questions about the intersection of careers and family careers, so to speak, where we compare Germany and the US. And in that research, we found that there’s a lot happening within the US that we actually can’t get a grip on. So that was the start off point for this project, where we’re like, there’s so much race segregation in these life courses happening in the US that we actually want to kind of look deeper into that.

Christine Garrington  3:07

Anette then just take us a little bit more deeply then into what it was you were looking specifically in this paper to get to grips with and why?

Anette Fasang  3:15 

Yes, we used a great data source, the so called National Longitudinal Study of youth for the United States, which has followed individuals for many years, re-interviewing them every year. And here we could for men and women born in the 60s, we could reconstruct their entire life courses from age 20 to 40. So their educational and work careers, when they were in school, when they finish, whether they were unemployed, whether they were on family leave, and which types of jobs they were in, where we could also distinguish was this sort of a low level low paying lower skilled job or a higher level highest high skilled job? So that’s how we could reconstruct their careers and for their family lives we also know exactly – were they living with a co-residential partner? When did they have children? Did they separate? Did they re-partner? And so we were able to reconstruct these entire life courses for black and white men and women to assess what kind of advantages and disadvantages accumulate over time for these different social groups.

Silke Aisenbrey  4:24 

We’re talking about comparing black individuals to white individuals in this paper, and that, of course, leads to this question – so why is that our focus? There are more groups than that in the US. And for us, it was that we really wanted to clearly focus on the on the white privilege and not kind of on the underprivileged group, and compare those to the group that we had the most data on and that were black women and black men. So we excluded Hispanics and other minorities in this specific research, so that’s why you’re having the comparison of black and white individuals here.

Anette Fasang  5:00   

What is often done, especially in this quantitative inequality research is that you have one point of reference and that’s typically white men. And then you interpret differences of white women, black women, black men, all referring to the white male experience and this in a way normalises it that the intersectionality approach or intersectionality theory criticises and we kind of jump on this paradigm by comparing all four groups visa vie as each other. So we compare black men to black women, to white women, to white men, and so on, and have all these pairwise comparisons to contextualise each group situation much more than only using this one reference point, as is often done.

Christine Garrington  5:44 

You talked about the normalising there Anette – what are the advantages? What makes it better if you like by taking this approach? Perhaps Silke you want to pick up?

Silke Aisenbrey  5:52 

Anette has said this beautifully. And I think your question is exactly on point so that the idea is that it normalises the privilege by not talking about the privilege. So in a way, if you compare every group to white men, the privilege that white male careers inhabits it basically gets unseen. So our commitment here and also the commitment of intersectionality research is really to say like, point out the privilege also describe the privilege and don’t only focus on those who are underprivileged. And we were very committed to that approach throughout the paper.

Christine Garrington  6:29 

That’s so interesting. Now, let’s dig right in now and look at the comparison that you made between white and black men, what were the key things to emerge there?

Silke Aisenbrey  6:38 

I think that the one thing that comes over and over is really when we look at the group of white men is really, basically they can have it all in the sense that they can have the high prestige career. And they can combine this high prestige career with any kind of family formation, they can be like single, they can have three kids, they can have one kid. So all of that is possible for white men, whereas for all the other groups, I know you just asked about black men, all of these variations are not open in the same way.

Anette Fasang  7:12 

A core focus of our paper was that we wanted to have these both aspects of the life course – work and family – and also look at the interplay between the two. And the idea here was that if events for example, in the family life strongly constrained economic opportunities. For example, if typically women but also men have children very early, that really limits their career prospects later on, especially if this is single parenthood. So this would be one way how an event in the family life course can constrain opportunities in the work life course. And the other way around, for example, for men, and we see this especially for black men holding a stable job, at least a stable job, even if it’s not a high stakes high earning job at at least a stable job is almost a precondition for then forming a stable partnership and having kids. So the two life course domains are interrelated in these many different ways that play out in mutually affecting each other over these entire 40, 20 years, that we observe the life course. And here our idea was is that if the connection between the two life domains work and family is very strong, that means that events in one life domain condition and constrain what is possible in the other life domain. So this is a in a sense, a sign of disadvantage, because there are more limited opportunities economically, but also for different family lives. And if they are unrelated, that means whatever happens in the work and family domain, whatever disadvantages or advantages there are, doesn’t spill over into the other life domain. And there’s just a wider set of possibilities for how life courses evolve. And indeed, what we found was that this interrelationship between work and family lives, was really, really low for white men. So basically non-existent, as Silke just described, it doesn’t mean that everybody gets what they want. Not all white men get get what they want. But for them, everything is possible in the sense that it actually occurs empirically, you have these very many different combinations of work and family lives. And this was quite different for the three other groups. And here we found that the strongest interrelation between work and family lives where they sort of condition and constrain each other was evident for black women.

Christine Garrington  9:43

Yes, on that note, I’m really interested to know because the picture was slightly different, wasn’t it for for black and white women.

Anette Fasang  9:49 

Yes, that is also I think an important point of our paper, that there’s a lot of research showing how the for example, family lives of lower educated black and white women are quite different. But we see equally large differences among highly educated black and white women. There’s really a lot of evidence that initial economic resources and then economic opportunities along the life course – so education, access to high quality jobs and so on – but also resources in the parental home. Those, those all have really strong effects on family lives. And then there’s also evidence showing how events and family lives like becoming a parent has repercussions for careers. So here there’s this whole literature on motherhood penalties how mothers make less money than childless women. But overall, the evidence that economic starting conditions are stronger predictors for family lives, is more convincing, and just broader than for the other way around that family events restrict their opportunities and work lives. And so what we argue here is that black men and women’s family options will be limited because they, on average, have worse economic starting conditions. And then for women, on the other hand, compared to men, there will be more repercussions of their family lives for their careers, which is also based on previous studies. And so if you take those two together, then of course, white men will have the most options because they are on average in economically privileged situations compared to the other groups on average. And their work events in their work lives, even unemployment have relatively modest effects on their family lives. Whereas when you go to the other end of the extreme here, black women, they’re both disadvantaged because they are black and face, on average, lower economic resources that limit their family options. And then because they are women, their family lives have stronger repercussions on their work careers. So that’s how the strongest interrelation in this long term interplay between the two life domains plays out according to our data,

Silke Aisenbrey  12:01 

I just want to go back to what I said earlier that one of the like, important things about our research is that we really also want to look at privilege. So I think it’s worth kind of just looking at this high prestige group to kind of make that comparison and what you can really see when we look at black women that there is this double under privilege happening, that you can’t even find empirically any black women in this high prestige group. So you you do find white women, and there mainly have no kids or have a kid later in life. And you do find some black men who also only have one kid and later in life, but you can’t even find black women. And I think that’s something that needs to be pointed out and needs to be underlined.

Christine Garrington  12:46 

No that’s a really important point to make Silke thank-you. So when you were thinking about the policy intervention implications of all this, then you sort of started to consider what might work best, what was your thinking Silke?

Silke Aisenbrey  12:59 

It’s a very complicated question because you you will see that when you look at at the medium prestige group and at the high prestige group that a lot is attached to having children or not having children and for women also, to have partners. And as we know, a lot of work in home still falls on the burden of women. So I think childcare is definitely like a very, very big thing. And especially in the US, where like most childcare for smaller children is private, it is hardly accessible for anyone who is not working in a high prestige career. So I think childcare is really one of the like main things that we need to like look at.

Anette Fasang  13:37 

So another thing that I found really striking was when we looked at these work, family life courses, and which ones are most prevalent for black men, but we found as Silke said, there is a smaller group of black men who have that highest earnings, one or two children, usually late or classic, successful upper middle class life course. But these are only 12% of black men. That means the remaining 88% have low, in our case really low prestige jobs with low earnings. There are no stable middle class careers among black men of these generations that we’re looking at. And what I found particularly striking and this is something you can only see in this longitudinal process perspective, that 62% of them have unstable low prestige, low income careers. So that means they are frequently interrupted by periods of unemployment or being out of the labour force entirely. So that means 62% of black men in these cohorts have really precarious careers. And all of them actually have family lives that are either childless or they’re single fathers. So these precarious work careers really go along with having sort of non-traditional or at least family careers that don’t go along with stable co-residential partnerships. And how this bridges into the policy point is that I think one thing our findings, if you take them all together really support quite strongly is that the lack of initial economic opportunity sets, especially black men and women on a difficult path early on, and really limits their family opportunities. So what is implied and this of course, is if you want to equalise work family life courses among these four intersectional groups, then equalising economic starting conditions would be quite important early in early childhood or in early adulthood. And this is these early interventions are particularly important because then you can break cycles of increasingly cumulatively, increasing advantages or disadvantages like these vicious or virtuous cycles that we know from many different studies tend to play out over time in these life courses.

Silke Aisenbrey  16:00 

I also think that the access to education is just still very, very segregated for different groups in the US. So I think that’s also always something that needs to be said.

Anette Fasang  16:09 

What also was interesting about these findings is actually how the large proportion of people who remain in similar career tracks that they entered early on, there is of course, some upward mobility there is also some downward mobility. But we see many people are kind of locked in the same precarious careers over 20 years from age 20 to 40. That never make it out. So I think many things are missed. If you only look at, for example, people’s work situation at age 25. When you take into account how many of them who are in disadvantageous positions actually remained in those for very extended periods of time.

Silke Aisenbrey  16:52 

Parental leave also, of course comes to mind when we think about these full careers. And this is also important because when we talk about cumulative advantages, we see that in the US parental leave is often only accessible if you have careers and medium or high prestige jobs. So if you’re once on this career track, the advantages just cumulate between like childcare, and parental leave, all of these things are accessible, much easier to people who are already in privileged positions.

Christine Garrington  17:25 

“Uncovering Social Stratification; Intersectional Inequalities in Work and Family Life Courses by Gender and Race” is research by Anette Fasang and Silke Aisenbrey and is published in the journal Social Forces. You can find out more about the Equal Lives project at www.equal-lives.org and subscribe to the DIAL podcast to access earlier and forthcoming episodes. Thanks for listening to this episode, which was presented and produced by Chris Garrington.

DIAL Final Conference presentation videos published

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A selection of recordings from the DIAL Final Conference have been published and can be viewed below. Click on the title of the presentation to start the video.

All videos are subtitled and published with the consent of the presenter.

Read about the highlights of the DIAL Final Conference
Visit the DIAL Final Conference event page

 

Opening words
Elina Kilpi-Jakonen

1A Labour market inequalities and their consequences I

Critical Life Events and the Dynamics of Inequality: Findings from the CRITEVENTS Project.
Thomas Leopold, Juho Harkonen, Christiaan Monden, Daniel Oesch

2A Labour market inequalities and their consequences II

Dynamics of Accumulated Inequalities for Seniors in Employment: An Overview of the Main Findings and Policy Implications
Nicky Le Feuvre, Clary Krekula, Alena Krizkova, Aine Ni Leime, Wendy Lottero, Nathalie Rougier, Sarah Vickerstaff

2C Labour market inequalities and their consequences IV

LGBTQ Workplace Inequalities: Exploring conceptual and policy scenarios with agent-based modelling
Matthew Hall, Andrew King

3C Inequality across the life-course

Early Childhood Inequalities: Determinants, Consequences, and Policies
Gabriella Conti, Sarah Cattan, Kjell Salvanes, Aline Buetikofer, Christine Farquharson (and more)

Norface-DIAL-TRISP: Summary of Research Projects
Alexander Ludwig

Lives in Welfare States: Life courses and social inequality in four European countries.
Anette Fasang, Stefan Bastholm Andrade, Selçuk Bedük, Zafer Büyükkeçeci, Aleksi Karhula

The promise & ethics of genetic data for policy
Hans Van Kippersluis, Samuel Baker, Teresa Bago d’Uva, Pietro Biroli, Rita Dias Pereira, Titus Galama, Fleur Meddens, Dilnoza Muslimova, Emil Normark Sorensen, Niels Rietveld, Eric Slob, Kevin Thom, Nicolai Vitt, Stephanie von Hinke

4A Intergenerational transmission of Inequalities

Life-Course Dynamics of Educational Tracking – A Summary of Findings
Steffen Schindler

Child vocabulary development from early to late childhood and the influence of father’s occupation, using data from two British longitudinal studies.
Helen Wareham, Joe Willoughby, James Law

4B Labour market inequalities and their consequences III

Comparative Panel File (CPF): A Novel Open Science Approach for Harmonizing International Surveys
Thomas Leopold, Konrad Turek, Matthijs Kalmijn,

4C Labour market inequalities and their consequences V

Inequality, Redistribution and the Labour Market
Richard Blundell

Social security for all? Cost of unemployment on income across the distribution in different welfare regimes
Selçuk Bedük, Anette Fasang, Susan Harkness, Stefan Bastholm Andrade, Zafer Büyükkeçeci, Satu Helske, Aleksi Karhula

5A Development of inequalities during childhood and youth

Family Policy and Child Development
Larissa Zierow, Francesco Andreoli, Arnaud Lefranc

5C Topical issues in life-course research

Pink-washing in (Post)Brexit Britain: Scottish Exceptionalism?
Yvette Taylor

Gender inequalities during Covid-19
Monica Costa-Dias, Alison Andrew, Sonya Krutikova, Lucy Kraftman

Genetic data and risky health behaviours
Stephanie von Hinke, Samuel Baker, Teresa Bago d’Uva, Pietro Biroli, Rita Dias Pereira, Titus Galama, Fleur Meddens, Dilnoza Muslimova, Emil Normark Sorensen, Niels Rietveld, Eric Slob, Kevin Thom, Hans van Kippersluis, Nicolai Vitt

Self-control skills and parenting as resiliency/protective factors in preterm born adolescents
Ayten Bilgin, Dieter Wolke, Nicole Baumann, Hayley Trower, Asteria Brylka, Katri Räikkönen, Kati Heinonen, Eero Kajantie, Daniel Schnitzlein, & Sakari Lemola, and the PremLife research group.

Sharing housework in the pandemic: what changed and for how long?

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In Episode 5 of Series 2 of our podcast, we talk to Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez from the University of Berlin and Susan Harkness from the University of Bristol about research from the DIAL funded Equal Lives project on the gendered division of housework during lockdown and whether or not changes that happened were temporary or long-lasting.

Gender division of housework during the COVID-19 pandemic: Temporary shocks or durable change? 

is research published in Demographic Research by Alejandra Rodríguez-Sánchez, Anette Fasang and Susan Harkness.

 

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In this series, we’re discussing findings from DIAL’s Equal Lives Project, which looks at how inequality impacts the lives of young adults. Our guests in today’s episode, are Equal Lives’ Principal Investigator Susan Harkness, and Aleja Rodríguez Sánchez. They’ve been looking at the gender division of housework during the COVID-19 pandemic, to see whether any changes are temporary or longer lasting. I started by asking Susan to explain the backdrop to the research.

Susan Harkness  0:32 

So this research fits into a larger body of research looking at how inequalities evolve over the lifecourse. And so when COVID came along, we realised it revealed that there are really important changes going on and new inequalities and growing inequalities we needed to think about so a part of that we’re looking at what is happening within families, and in particular, how households divide their labour because that has implications for what happens in the labour market and what happens to broader inequalities.

Christine Garrington  1:01 

Aleja what exactly was it that you’re hoping to get a better handle on, a better understanding of in all of this?

Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez  1:09

Yeah, we started with the idea that maybe the effects of the pandemic and the lockdown on the division of labour were going to affect some people more than others. We intended to look at what couples would do differently if they had children or didn’t have children. We also further wanted to look at whether the age of the child would make a difference in how the pandemic impacted the division of labour. But then we realised that there were a lot of things going on at the same time and it wasn’t going to be easy to sort of look at one moment in time and before and after. And so we wanted to give it a more dynamic look and see how the situation evolved over time as these further changes in the furlough scheme, childcare and school closures were put in place and then lifted. 

Christine Garrington  1:55 

Can you talk us through exactly what it was that you that you did?

Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez  1:58 

We opted for a very, first, very descriptive type of study, looking at the share of housework done by women, and here we look at the percentage or the proportion or the share that it’s done by women of the total amount of number of hours spent on housework, cooking, cleaning, but does not include childcare in this case. So we want to know how that share of the work done by women changed. So we wanted to look at this quantity at different moments in the pandemic. We wanted to look at it first shock but then we also wanted to look at what happened after that first shock, whether those same things, the same effects would have stayed over time or were they, whether there would need some sort of change. And for that we use a technique called kernel density estimation, which helps us to see how the distribution of a variable in the population has shifted over time. So we wanted to first estimate pre-pandemic distribution and then we wanted to see how the distribution has shifted over time. Then secondly, we wanted to sort of further those descriptive analysis with a fixed effects type of regression, which basically we tried to compare couples to their own selves in the past to sort of get rid of some of the heterogeneity that it’s unobserved. 

Christine Garrington  3:13 

You got your information from an especially conducted COVID survey, what sorts of things were people asked in that that made it possible to look really closely at these questions?

 Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez  3:23  

Yeah, the COVID survey – it’s really like a special very special or very unique study, in a way even for other in comparison to other UK studies that were done during the first year of COVID. The sample is basically a sub sample of this Understanding Society study, which is this much larger study that has followed UK households for more than 10 years. And there were lots of questions on how the COVID pandemic affected sort of the general welfare of households and individuals and there were questions about socio-economic conditions, I think, unemployment stuff, and there were also things about family dynamics. So it’s quite comprehensive. And I think there’s a lot more to see in there.

Christine Garrington  4:02 

How and why do surveys like this help us gain such important insights into what is going on in people’s lives and how that’s changing over time?

Susan Harkness  4:11 

Okay, so there’s two things that are really valuable about surveys like the UK household Longitudinal Survey, or Understanding Society, as we call it. First of all, it’s a survey that’s conducted at the household level so we can see what’s going on. Not just amongst individuals, but how, how relationships within the household pan out. And then the second thing that’s valuable about it of course, is the longitudinal aspect. So that really allows us to look at changes over time. And that allows us to understand much more about why we have inequalities and how they affect different people. So in the case of the COVID studies, we can see where change happened, where they relatively, families where things were relatively equal before became more unequal? Or which particular groups were most affected? So we can see these changes over time. And I suppose if we look at the COVID Understanding Society surveys, and what’s also really valuable about this survey is that whilst there have been a lot of other surveys which have given us a sort of snapshot of what’s happening at a particular point in time, with the COVID surveys with Understanding Society, we can see how these inequalities are emerging as we move through the pandemic so we can see who is being affected and how that is changing for them over time.

Christine Garrington  5:30 

Yeah, really important and Aleja so let’s get down into the nitty gritty then – when you, when you looked over time at how men and women were dividing housework or sharing housework at different times during the pandemic. What did you find?

Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez  5:44 

Yeah, well, we found a remarkable first data set that is seen as a sort of shift in the distribution towards more equality between couples. So the original pre-pandemic distribution it’s quite was quite unequal and therefore sort of skewed looking like more women, we’re doing more. So visually, it really looks like a bump around like 65-70%, which means really, women do the majority of this housework. And so the first shock is that the shape of that bump to the left, so to say towards more equality, so it’s close to 50/50 but it’s not quite there yet. And then after, after that first shock with the data for further and further waves revealed was a gradual, but a clear return to previous levels, that we’re seeing pre-pandemic where women started to do again a higher percentage of the total housework over time. And this sort of return to normal was especially clear for couples with children, whereas couples without children, we saw that this higher equality achieve after their lockdown or during the lockdown was more sustained. And these results were also confirmed with the fixed effects regression that I mentioned. So we think that the results basically show us that there were different trends, depending on the lifecourse stage in which the family was.

Christine Garrington  7:07 

Yeah, so it looks to be fairly robust doesn’t it? And Susan, is that what you expected to see? Or were you surprised that having children made a difference to whether couples continue to share housework more equally, or revert to their pre-pandemic habits as it were in this, this area?

Susan Harkness  7:23 

Right, well of course, I mean, COVID has been an enormous shock, I think. Especially in the early months where we had people’s work was affected, and for those who had children schools were closed. And I think that shock meant that couples changed their behaviour, whether they had children or not. And of course, there was a lot of early optimism that, that those changes would mean a bit more gender equality. But what we’ve seen is I think that as people have adapted, we’ve seen the sort of patterns emerge in a way that’s quite similar to what happens for example, when children, children are born. And we have this specialisation, where women tend to revert back to taking on more of the roles involved in sort of looking after the house whereas men tend to specialise more in work. So sadly, and I think for those with children, I think we see these greater specialisation – so children are often a trigger for more specialisation within households with, with men doing more paid work and women doing more of the housework. And I think to some extent, what we’re finding reflects these, these old patterns that we’ve seen previously in the data before COVID. So perhaps early optimism was, was not as well placed as it might have been.

Christine Garrington  8:31 

Hmmm I will ask you a bit more about the implications of that in a moment, but Aleja what would you say that we’ve learned from this piece of research that you’ve done and I wonder if you have plans to look further at this particular area, this particular aspect of people’s lives?

Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez  8:45 

I think one key message besides what Susan has already said is that before and after comparisons, sort of they can be informative, but they’re only showing us like a snapshot of what actually happened. And longitudinal data is really key because for us, we gained a lot of information by actually looking at how things evolved over time, which gives a different take on this, on how, when we claimed, those early claims on how the pandemic would change at all for the better or worse we are definitely looking at working already further on the COVID-19 effects. But this time, we’re going to, we’re shifting the perspective from the couple to the children in particular to teenagers. We’re interested in understanding what factors may explain some preliminary findings on what was found as the serious deterioration of mental health among teenagers, especially teenage girls. We want to see what factors about their families but particularly about mothers who were also having, were having a hard time during the pandemic may explain what happened to teenagers. And so we’re working with Susan and Annette on this.

Christine Garrington  9:52 

Yeah, no really interesting, more really important work to come by the sounds of things. So Susan, just to wrap up really a lot has been said about how COVID-19 has negatively affected the lives of women more than men. Fears have been expressed around the reversal of any sort of pre-pandemic trends towards a greater gender equality. Would you say that this piece of research and, and other work that you’re doing tells us anything about that, do you think?

Susan Harkness  10:17 

Well, I think certainly other studies have, have shown that women’s mental health has been particularly adversely affected by the pandemic and particularly by the lockdown measures, so we know that some of the responses to the COVID crisis have really negatively affected women more than they have affected men. We’ve also, I think seeing some trends in the labour market where particularly mother’s employment is perhaps recovering a bit more slowly than that, that of men to pre-pandemic levels of employment and hours of work. So I think there are some indications that there are implications for gender equality, and that those are not necessarily going to be reversed in the short term. I think the longer-term consequences are much harder to tell of course. You know, what effect this, these, these closures has on women and their careers is, it’s something that we don’t yet know, but it’s, it’s not hard to imagine reasons that parents may feel that they’re going to fall, fall behind in the labour market because of the extra roles they’ve had to take on over this crisis. And I suppose the question remains about whether in the longer term, they’ll be able to catch up with where they may have been otherwise.

Christine Garrington  11:31 

“Gender Division of Housework Furing the COVID-19 Pandemic: Temporary Shocks or Durable Change” is research by Alejandro Rodriguez Sanchez, Annette Fasang and Susan Harkness and is published in Demographic Research. You can find out more about the Equal Lives project at www.equal-lives.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington. Don’t forget to subscribe to the DIAL podcast to access earlier and forthcoming episodes.

Extending working life: what needs to change to make policies work?

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In Episode 13 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Professor Nicky LeFeuvre from the University of Lausanne discusses findings from DIAL’s DAISIE project (Dynamics of Accumulated Inequalities for Seniors in Employment, which has been exploring the gendered impacts of policies aimed at extending working life. 

 

 

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00  

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series three we’re discussing emerging findings from DIAL research. For this episode, we’re talking to Nicky LeFeuvre from the University of Lausanne about findings from DIAL’s DAISIE project, which has been exploring the gendered impacts of policies aimed at extending working life. I started by asking her to talk about the policy backdrop to the research

Nicky LeFeuvre  0:25  

Over the last 10 or 12 years there has been this quite widespread consensus about the need to extend working lives and this consensus has existed at national levels, you know, government initiatives, also across international organisations like the OECD, and the dominant narrative has been based on kind of two or three basic assumptions this inevitability of increasing full pension age, to keep pace with life expectancy. Questions about the sustainability of our existing welfare systems, pension systems, and also a discourse around personal individual choice and personal responsibility. You know, this idea fielded by the OECD that people are increasingly free to construct their own biographies and so there has been this sort of focus on rewardingly later retirement or penalising early retirement in actual fact, and relatively little concern for the inherent, I would say dynamics of accumulated inequality that lie behind this policy objective. And so this was very much something that we wanted to address in the in the DAISIE project and of course, it was completely in line with the overall aims of the DIAL programme. And our sort of particular focus was to say okay, individuals are receiving this policy discourse which is relatively homogenous across the board, and what are they doing with it? Okay, how is this really impacting on their lives? And notably, how is this being interpreted and acted upon by their employers, by the occupations that they’re in? And to what extent their past life experiences, particularly their employment histories, and the way that their past employment has been articulated with their care duties if they happen to be women? How is all this coming together to produce a, what we presume would be quite a varied experience of what extended working life actually means for individuals and for organisations, to be honest.

Christine Garrington  2:28  

Yeah, now that brings me very nicely on to my next question, actually, because in recent years, policymakers have really recognised the need, the importance of taking, you know what we talked about as a life course approach to this issue, something you’ve just hinted at, and, and this is something that really resonates with your research. Tell us why this is so important.

Nicky LeFeuvre  2:45  

I think there has been it’s been slow to come, but it is there, I would say, perhaps emerging recognition that rather than full-fledged recognition at the moment of the need to avoid the accumulation of individual disadvantages over the life course in terms of extended working life and this is related to health issues. You know, we do not age equally, people are not as equally able to envisage extending their working lives and they’re also not as equally motivated to do so. So that this recognition has come or is coming slowly. And in the most recent OECD document, for example, which is entitled working better with age, there is this idea that perhaps there has been too, too much of focus on these financial incentives. So making it you know, financially penalising people for leaving the labour market too early with the too being in speech marks and the need to address what is often termed demand side barriers to extended working life. And I really do like this this quote from the OECD that now recognises the fact that we need workers who want to work longer and also employers who want to employ them, and I think this is really the crux of the issue here. You know, there’s there is this emerging shift towards the recognition that this is not just about individual choice that these extended work, working life issues are related to a whole host of structural constraints and opportunities. And this is really what we were wanting to do in the DAISIE project. It does really resonate with us because we were arguing that it is important to look beyond macro level policies and to study exactly how they are being interpreted how they’re being applied by employers and by individuals according to the you know, particular histories and their particular circumstances. So yes, this this really was very exciting for us, because we did see this policy shift on the horizon, as we were, you know, preparing to to address those issues in the project.

Christine Garrington  4:58  

Yeah, that’s great. That’s a really neat summary of the backdrop to this work. So let’s move on then. And if you could give us an outline an overview of what the DAISIE project has actually been doing?

Nicky LeFeuvre  5:12  

We set out to adopt what we called a multi-level research design, because we wanted to integrate as I just said, the policy background obviously you can’t completely abstract this out of your reasoning. So we did want to look at the similarities or the variations in these extended working life policies across countries and see whether there were some best practices or some policy recommendations that were being really adopted across the board and others that were perhaps, you know, more localised in certain contexts or certain countries. So we wanted this macro level analysis of working life practices, but also the objectives that were that were being defined by by different policymakers, either at the EU level or in particular countries. We also wanted to sort of micro socio sort of individual analysis. So we wanted to explore particularly the well-being, the health and the work life balance issues that older workers were facing. So we knew we wanted to use biographical accounts we wanted life history interviews, we wanted really to be able to get at the experiences of older workers, which are kind of slightly invisiblised in the policy documents. And in order to integrate those two levels or those two scales of analysis, we needed the mezzo level which is the sort of intermediate level the occupational and the organisational level, as I said previously, often sort of left out of existing analyses in order to look at what was happening in different employment sectors. And therefore, we adopted this case study method where we selected three different occupations or three different sectors: finance, health and transport. And with our sort of cross-national comparative perspective, we then looked at these three sectors that we could compare both within with other sectors within the same country and across countries to see whether these extended working-like issues were being addressed and implemented to the same extent and in the same ways in different sectors and in different countries.

Christine Garrington  7:20  

Such an ambitious programme of research and also at a very challenging time with everything going on with COVID.

Nicky LeFeuvre  7:27  

Carrying out empirical fieldwork during the COVID pandemic was a little bit challenging for us. But what we’ve actually done is cross country and cross sector comparative analysis using case studies that we carried out in the five countries and in three different sectors as I said, health sector, health sector, finance and transport. We have collected a huge amounts of empirical data, qualitative data to a large extent. We’ve used biographical interviews with older workers, male and female workers, and we have about 500 of these interviews across the board. We have of course prepared English language summaries of these interviews because we have to now compare them comparatively and they were not carried out all in the same language. So as you can imagine, this is slightly challenging. And we’ve also done about 60 expert interviews and we met up in each country and each company we went into we met with the human resource managers, we we talked to line managers, trade union representatives, and so on, to get a feel of how ageing at work was being framed in these different institutions. And we have a collection of about 500 life course grids, which enable us to kind of visualise the life course events that led up to people ageing at work, if you like. So the family events, the residential ability events and of course, their employment histories that frame the ways in which they are now thinking about whether they’re going to retire at what age they want to retire, whether they could envisage extending their working lives and under what circumstances. So quite quite a wealth of data. We’re starting to get to grips with along with a secondary statistical analysis that we did previous to the to the case studies.

Christine Garrington  9:12  

So what are the sort of the first things, most the things that you did early on Nicky I think was to map older workers employment trends, what were the key things to emerge there?

Nicky LeFeuvre  9:22  

We were really interested in looking at cross national differences here. And of course, we do see and that’s not you know, that’s unsurprising given given the convergence in the policy measures that I mentioned earlier. We do see a convergence of the employment rates, basically in the 55 to 64 year age group, I would say. So if we look at the data over the past 10 years, the differences between countries have been reduced. We still have about, you know, up to 20% difference in employment rates at 55 to 64. So this is not negligible at all, but the differences across countries are becoming smaller. So there’s there’s this idea of a kind of norm of extended working life, but remember, I’m talking about 55 to 64 here so what we’re really looking at is actually encouraging people to work up to full retirement age and very little actually about encouraging people to work beyond full retirement age. I think that’s a you know, quite an important point to remember when we’re talking about ageing at work. In actual fact, we’re looking at 55 to 64. And that’s where you know that the changes have been over recent years. The other important thing to remember is that there has been a slight reduction in the gender gap in retirement timing. Over the same period, women do continue to retire earlier than than their male counterparts in in almost all of the countries we’ve looked at. And of course, that’s why they they are to a certain extent the prime targets of many extended working life policies in recent years. But the the gap in the retirement, the actual retirement age of men and women has been falling. And that’s also very interesting because it means that the gender dimension of what it means to age at work becomes particularly important to look at in detail.

Christine Garrington  11:18  

So although as you said, you looked across a number of employment sectors, we’re going to be focusing in on the finance sector for our interview today. So my first question is why the finance sector?

Nicky LeFeuvre  11:28 

We were trying to decide which sectors to focus our case studies on. Several criteria were taken into consideration. One of them was of course the gender composition so we wanted sectors that was sort of contrasting in terms of the share of male and female workers. So healthcare was our sort of highly feminised sector transport our highly masculinised and finance our sort of gender balanced sector. Then we wanted sectors where the share of older workers was quite variable. And finance actually is the sector where we have the lowest share of older workers of the three sectors we looked at we have more or less depending on countries there is some variation around 20 to 30% of over 50 year olds in the finance sector, which is let’s to give an example half the rates of older workers in employment compared to the transport sector for example. So quite a low share of older workers in finance. And this is obviously related to the history of the of the sector of the occupation. Which is an occupation which has been downsizing and restructuring for the past 20 to 30 years. And where older workers have in most countries been targeted during these restructuring, downsizing operations and have often been offered various early retirement packages, or at least some older workers, mostly male managers, in fact, have been offered packages. And so the finance sector has kind of lopped off a whole generation. And this means that today, it is one of the sectors were that were older workers are relatively underrepresented. But it’s a sector that is now facing a number of challenges whether these rather generous early retirement packages have become financially non-viable, and where there’s also been some recognition that the accumulated experience of older workers, actually the banks actually needed that experience in order to face the new challenges. And so there is a shift in policy and this was also very interesting for us.

Christine Garrington  13:39  

Okay, let’s move on to some numbers then. What were you able to see in terms of the share or the proportions of the numbers of older workers in the finance sector?

Nicky LeFeuvre  13:47  

So, the moment we have a very, very small share of older workers, if I give you just you know, some figures for example, in in the Czech Republic, only 10% of men working in the finance sector are aged over 50 in 2019, but 20% of women in the Czech finance sector are aged over 50. So this is also interesting. It’s one of the rare sectors where, proportionally speaking, the share of older women, as compared to the whole female workforce is greater than the share of older men as part of the male workforce. And this is quite a rare configuration in sort of the European labour markets at the moment. So that was also something that we were very interested in exploring further.

Christine Garrington  14:31  

So let’s dig now into some of the rather wonderful data that you’ve been collecting, especially that qualitative data so when you asked workers about their experiences of being older employees in this sector, what were some of those key things that come out of that? Of what they told you?

Nicky LeFeuvre  14:46 

Well, perhaps I can, I can start with a rather eloquent quote from one of our Swiss interviewees, and I mean you have to take this against the backdrop of this very sort of systematic offloading of older workers over the past 30 years from the banking sector, and one of our interviewees said sort of almost in a whisper “ageing is something we just don’t talk about in this bank”. And this really I think, translates quite nicely how stigmatised the question of ageing is within the banking sector. We came across a lot of negative stereotypes about older workers. Older workers are systematically presented as lacking skills, being unable to keep up with the pace of organisational and technological change. And to a certain extent, this is of course the banks justifying their past age management policies which were almost entirely based on externalising ageing at work if you like, getting rid of their older workers, before they actually had to deal with ageing at work. And so in a lot of our interviews, ageing was seen as either something that could possibly enable one to leave the finance sector well before reaching retirement age. So you know showing that you were not able to adapt was seen as as a as a good reason to to leave early, or as something that was quite risky in that the bank could therefore consider you to be too old and and not flexible enough to face the challenges of this digital revolution that’s going on in in banking, and therefore you could be made redundant because you were not keeping up with the pace of things. So basically, there was this idea that age is something that we don’t talk about and older workers are a great pains to prove to their employers and to the themselves and to their colleagues, that they are actually not part of this terrible stigmatised group that one would call older workers.

Christine Garrington  16:56  

So some quite unexpected views expressed there about this whole issue of being an older worker, and what are the implications of that for any sort of age management policies that any business might want to put in place in this sector?

Nicky LeFeuvre  17:10  

Any kind of age management strategies that are adopted in this in this context, are destined to fail basically, because people refuse to be identified with a stigmatised group. That would be the target of you know, these age management policies, and therefore, even when there are minimal measures, I mean, we didn’t have a huge range of age management measures that we came across in our case study banks but most of them were related rather to the transition to retirement. So you know, accompanying workers in the transition to retirement, which we consider not really to be age management policies at all because this is you know, this is thinking about how to get rid of your older workers still, rather than thinking about what you do with them when they stay. But even in in those cases, there was a very, very low take up rate because nobody really wanted to run the risk of being identified as an older worker, because this was such a, you know a stigmatised category, and no one wanted to be demoted, or no one wanted to be encouraged to leave because they were part of that group.

Christine Garrington  18:13  

So Nicky, there seems to be a real disjunct – a real mismatch here between the sort of policy top level policy narrative that you outlined earlier and what you’re actually hearing on the ground from workers. You know, what, what’s your take on all of that? How does this chime with that policy narrative that you were outlining?

Nicky LeFeuvre  18:29  

Yes, so I mean, I think these results do, really do tell us that any serious attempt at extending the duration of our working lives requires the active involvement of employers in the business sector as a whole. It’s it’s quite incredible I think that we should find such a small share of older workers in a non-manual sector like banking, where the physical limitations to you know working longer in terms of health and well-being should in theory be far more limited than in the health sector or in the transport sector, but actually, we find the opposite. We find that finance, in finance we have a small share of older workers. So this really does confirm that postponing retirement is not only about health, it’s not only about financial incentives, and it is very much about how older workers are perceived within particular sectors, how they are treated by their employers, and particular I think in those parts of the job market that are looking to reduce staff costs that are looking to scale down their activities or who are confronted with technological change or organisational restructuring. Then, then we really do have to accompany I think companies in in looking at how they, how they frame the whole issue of, of ageing and working.

Christine Garrington  19:51  

Something I found quite extraordinary in in your research was that when you spoke to companies they expressed, expressed a reluctance or hesitation to introduce any age related policies for fear that this would somehow be seen as discriminatory in some way. What’s your take on that?

Nicky LeFeuvre  20:08  

We had a number of examples where HR managers line managers went to great lengths to explain to us that they couldn’t offer any positive support to their older workers because this would be seen to be discriminatory towards other groups of workers. And so we were kind of left a little bit speechless at this thinking, but what interpretation of equal opportunity is being developed here? And why is it that companies believe and they do apparently strongly believe that any accommodation of ageing in organisational structures in the way that work is shared  out or the way working time expectations or or shift work organisation – anything that would facilitate the experiences of older workers identified as a group with potentially some needs that are different to those of other age groups. This should not be seen as discrimination. This should be seen as equal opportunity policy, and it shouldn’t be seen as coming into conflict, for example, with gender equality policies or with parental support policies or whatever other objectives companies are seeking to meet. So I think, really applying or emphasising the need to think equal opportunities in an intersectional way looking at how gender and age and ethnic origin and disability and so on, interact across the life course and how employers can deal with these in innovative and creative and complex ways. I think this would be really something very useful because we were struck by this, this difficulty that that organisations were facing in thinking through what they could actually do to support their, their older workers.

Christine Garrington  22:05  

You did make a number of quite clear recommendations for employers and policy makers in the work that you’ve done. Can you just talk us through those?

Nicky LeFeuvre  22:12  

The need for organisations I would say, you know, policymakers at the national level, international level, but also within companies to recognise that there is a potential mismatch. In fact, in the older workers we are talking about as a target group for extended working life policies. Spontaneously when we when we talk to to employers about the kind of older workers that they would be interested in keeping on that they would be interested in training or that they would be interested to target for bridge schemes or for unretirement schemes as they call it and so this possibility of employing retirees back perhaps on a on a reduced rate. Companies do have quite clear, clear image of the kind of worker that they would be interested in in involving in those kinds of schemes. Unfortunately, those images do not equate very well with the profiles of the workers who are actually motivated and interested in extending their working lives. Who tend not to be the most highly qualified or who tend not to be the workers who have continuous employment histories. Who have had haven’t had any major health events during their adult life course, who haven’t had any significant care commitments that have taken them out of the labour market, who have relatively comfortable financial arrangements made for their latter years and so on and so forth.

Christine Garrington  23:37 

So among the people you spoke to then, who was motivated to extend their working lives and why? 

Nicky LeFeuvre  23:45  

Workers can also be motivated because for example, they have developed their careers quite late on in life. So maybe they are just moving into a management position because they’ve had, if they’re women, they have had some years out of employment for family reasons. We also had a number of very interesting testimonies from older women saying that continuing to work longer was actually very attractive to them, because it was one way of avoiding being swamped by care duties that they could be expected to take charge off in later life. So either you know, being on call for grandchildren or being available for elderly dependent relatives. This idea that continuing to work was actually a way of avoiding being overwhelmed by by these care expectations was something perhaps something we were not expecting to find to such a wide extent. And so quite clearly, women like that who are interested in extending their working lives as long as their working conditions are adapted to their needs are not being identified at the moment as resources that employers could call upon, and people that the employers could have in mind when they think about how they are going to manage age. You know what strategies they’re going to put in place and how they’re going to start, operationalizing their age management policies before people become old you know before people get to within two or three years of retiring.

Christine Garrington  25:20  

So is there a simple message in all of this?

Nicky LeFeuvre  25:22  

Making it clear that they’re the kind of people that employers would spontaneously think about as their target group for extending working lives are not necessarily primarily the people who are interested in extending their working lives, but there are other groups who are highly motivated to work for longer. I think this is you know, one message that we can pull out of the research that could translate into some quite exciting and quite innovative policy decisions on the ground as it were.

Christine Garrington  25:55  

Dynamics of accumulated inequalities for seniors in employment is a DIAL research project, looking at the gendered impacts of policies and an extended working life. You can find out more on the DIAL website at dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which was presented by me, Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Highlights from the DIAL Final Conference

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The final conference of the Dynamics of Inequality across the Life-course (DIAL) research programme took place in Brussels on the 21st and 22nd of October 2021. The conference gathered researchers and stakeholders to discuss the research on social inequality produced in the various DIAL projects. The conference was organized in a hybrid format in which all the keynote lectures and parallel sessions taking place in Brussels were streamed for the online audience. Additionally, part of the program took place fully online. Registration for the online conference was widely advertised, and there were over 100 participants following the conference remotely in addition to almost 60 participants on-site in Renaissance Brussels Hotel.

Two intensive conference days contained thought-provoking presentations, lively debates between researchers and stakeholders and coffee breaks filled with informal discussions of research and more. The conference started with the opening words by the DIAL Scientific Programme Coordinator Elina Kilpi-Jakonen. Kilpi-Jakonen gave an overview of DIAL projects and output published so far, highlighting in particular the interdisciplinary work on social mobility and gender differences in labour market careers. With great sadness, the unexpected death of James Law (leader of the SEED project) was also announced. This was followed by the keynote lectures by Professor David Bell (University of Stirling), Associate Professor Anna Matysiak (University of Warsaw), and Director for Social Rights Katarina Ivanković Knežević (European Commission). Bell focused on the unequal impacts of the covid-19 pandemic and how governments were able to cushion some of these effects in terms of redistribution. Matysiak talked about changing demand for skills, and how men and women differ in skills but are also rewarded differently for these skills. Ivanković Knežević gave an overview of the European Commission’s agenda for addressing social inequalities across the life-course, highlighting policies such as the EU child and youth guarantees.

Research by DIAL researchers was presented and discussed in the parallel sessions. These sessions contained summary presentations from the various DIAL projects as well as paper presentations concentrating on inequalities across the life-course. The presentations covered the whole human lifespan: from prenatal and postnatal maternal smoking to income inequality in mortality. There were a total of fourteen parallel sessions that focused on the main themes of the DIAL projects: child development, educational inequalities, labour market inequalities, intergenerational transmission of advantages, gender inequalities, LGBTIQ+ discrimination, and unequal ageing.

The final conference had the great pleasure to welcome stakeholder discussants to many of the sessions. Discussants from the European Commission, European Trade Union Confederation, OECD, European Parliamentary Research Service, Eurochild, and COFACE Families Europe were invited to hear about the recent research produced in DIAL and to give their insights into how this fits into their work and what knowledge is needed from the policy maker’s point of view. Amongst other themes, these discussants highlighted that, according to Eurobarometer 2017 data, the majority of Europeans perceive income inequality to be too high and would also like their governments to do something about this, and that inequalities in life expectancy are an important question to address in order to ensure dignity in ageing.

As the world is still in the middle of the pandemic, meeting and exchanging ideas with colleagues in person seemed to delight many of the on-site participants. On behalf of the DIAL organizing team, we thank all the conference participants for their active input. Please also note that many of the papers presented at the conference can be found on the DIAL website. Recordings of many of the presentations will also be made available soon.

The full conference programme is available here (updated 19 October 2021)

Educational opportunities for all: are countries the same or different?

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In the fourth episode of Series 2 of our Podcast looking at research from the Equal Lives project, we talk to Michael Grätz from the University of Lausanne and Swedish Institute for Social Research. He discusses research published in Demography involving Equal Lives team members Jani Erola and Aleksi Karhula which looks at siblings to to see whether educational opportunities are equal for all in and across 6 countries.

 

 

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00  

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series two we’re discussing emerging findings from DIAL’s Equal Lives project. For this episode, we’re talking to Michael Grätz from the University of Lausanne and Swedish Institute for Social Research about findings from research using siblings to see whether educational opportunities are equal for all in and across six countries. I started by asking him how studying the lives of siblings helps us to understand issues around equality of opportunity. 

Michael Grätz  0:30  

The simple argument of the study actually, of this approach of looking at the similarity of siblings in life outcomes is that this can be used as one measure of equality of opportunity. So equality of opportunity is something we’re interested in, which means that how much control people have over their chances in life. The traditional approach to measure equality of opportunity is you take some indicator of the parents like parental education and parental occupation, parental income and relate it to some indicator of the children like their educational attainment. And then you get some measure which which is which has something to do with the equality of opportunity. However, the problem of that approach is that we know that it’s going to overestimate equality and it’s going to underestimate inequality, because there are also factors affecting life chances, which are not observed parental characteristics. The idea of this using the similarity between between siblings and their education to measure equality of opportunity as some of these factors that are not observed are actually shared by siblings. So siblings do have the same parents, they live, they grew up in the same neighbourhood. They go to the same school often and all these factors influence their life chances and they are they are combined if we produce an estimate of the similarity of siblings and education as a measure of equality of opportunity. Now, I should also say that this is still not a perfect measure of equality of opportunity because we also know that there are factors that vary between siblings that influence their life chances, but still we know also from the empirical side, that using sibling similarity is a better measure of equality of opportunity than relating some kind of characteristic to the child characteristic, which is the most often used.

Christine Garrington  2:24  

Okay, understood. And so for this research then, Michael, what was it that you were looking at specifically and why?

Michael Grätz  2:29  

So the main thing we were interested in is the traditional question whether equality of opportunity varies across society. So we were producing estimates of sibling similarity in education for different countries. And then we were also interested in whether sibling similarity in education varies across different outcomes. So there are different educational outcomes that we were interested in, and we’re looking at three of them. So we’re looking at cognitive skills. We’re looking at school grades, and we’re looking at educational attainment. Of course, these three are related to each other, but still, they capture slightly different things. And it’s interesting to compare the cost and, and then the third thing we were interested in is whether they are some differences in sibling similarity across different social groups in society. So the idea is do the offspring of some sort of groups in society is more similar among each other than then the offspring of others. 

Christine Garrington  3:31  

Okay, took us through what you actually did to try to look at these, these issues then? 

Michael Grätz  3:35  

We asked the people we know to give us access to data and to produce these estimates. And this is really mainly a project where we produce comparative estimates of sibling similarity in education for different countries. So in our case, we have six countries. And then it’s mainly data work, where you have to put together all these datasets the different data sources we use for the different countries come up with different estimates, try to harmonise the data, which is a very challenging thing because we are talking about data which has been collected for different purposes with different strategies in different countries. And we want to have something comparable, and then you have challenges of making those data after it has been collected comparable to each other.

Christine Garrington  4:28  

Yeah, you talked about the data there. So where did that information come from and why were those data particularly good sources? For this type of research?

Michael Grätz  4:38  

There are two strategies you can have if you want to do a comparative research comparing different countries. So the one strategy is you use data sources which have been collected with the purpose of comparing them so collected in different countries. That’s, for instance, the PISA data that some of the listeners may know and the other approach is to use really what we think is the best data source for each country and compare them and it’s the second approach we have been taking in this paper. And one reason also we have to take these papers, because we were interested in siblings and siblings, information on siblings is not what is something that is often collected. So what we’re using in the data is really what we think are the best data source for each country. And this means that we’re using different data sources in different countries. So we using in Finland, Norway and Sweden using administrative data, because those countries have administrative data sets which can be used for research. In Germany, in the US and the UK we using a survey data sets – these are surveys that have been collected in those countries for a long time. And they are very large and they’re very reliable, and they have information on certain things.

Christine Garrington  5:48  

Fantastic. So time to dip into that data and talk a little bit about what you find. Let’s talk about cognitive, cognitive skills first. What were the key things to emerge in and across the countries that you looked at there? 

Michael Grätz  5:59  

The main finding actually is that for cognitive skills, there isn’t very much variation across countries. So meaning that equality of opportunity with respect to cognitive skills, something that was sort of similar across countries. And what we also saw because for cognitive skills we had two data sets for the US which we could use and those two data that gave slightly different results. And we see that the these differences which we find between the two datasets for the same country, about the same size as differences that we find between countries, so meaning that it’s not necessarily easy to tell what the differences then across countries whether they are really there, or whether they are just due to the fact that we have used different data sources.

Christine Garrington  6:46  

Okay, now one of the other outcomes was school grades. What did you see there?

Michael Grätz  6:50  

So school grades was an interesting outcome because that’s actually the only outcome for which we find that sibling similarity is lower in the US than in the Scandinavian countries. Meaning that equality of opportunity and school grades is higher in the US than in Sweden and Norway, which are the other two countries for which we have taken this outcome. The differences are not really large, but still this is this is something which goes in a different direction of what you usually expect and what you also have found for educational attainment. 

Christine Garrington  7:21  

On that note that was going to be my next question to you, so what overall education attainment – what did you see?

Michael Grätz  7:27  

So I think educational attainment in some sense, it’s the outcome we care more about most of all, because this is really the final educational attainment that respondents have observed. And this is this is also the outcome where we find a pattern of growth across national variation which is aligned with what we usually think in both as scientists but also in the policy discourse. So meaning is that we find that sibling similarity in education is highest in Germany and in the US, meaning that equality of opportunity is lowest in these countries. On the other hand, sibling similarity in the education is lower in Norway, Sweden and the UK. So these three countries are both on the same level in that respect was maybe a bit surprising is that in Finland, sibling similarity in education is once more again much lower. So meaning that they also within the group of Scandinavian countries – Sweden, Norway and Finland – there’s some variation. And there’s more equality of opportunity in Finland with respect to educational attainment in Finland than Norway, and in Sweden.

Christine Garrington  8:36  

Did the siblings’ family background matter at all and if so, how does that sort of play out?

Michael Grätz  8:42  

So the idea was that it could be that especially socioeconomically advantaged families can invest resources in the way that they make sure that all their children are succeeding well in life and getting a high level of education. So this is why we were speculating that there could be more sibling similarity among socioeconomically advantaged families. However, our empirical results were not really in line with this finding. So we didn’t we didn’t find much variation in that and the variation that we found was not really very robust across the different outcomes.

Christine Garrington  9:17  

So when it came to the question of which countries were providing the highest level of inequality of opportunity, what did you see there?

Michael Grätz  9:24  

So one thing is that the finding is not totally the same if you understand education and different things. So if you’re looking at the use different outcomes, but if you focus on final educational attainment, so which is really the highest decree from school that children obtain, then inequality is highest in Germany and the US, equality is highest in Finland, which is which is a result of our study, which is also I think, in line with the general perception. However, there’s also still two points I think that I would like to emphasise. So the first one is there’s still a lot of variation within the Scandinavian countries. So there’s more equality in Finland than in Norway in Sweden, meaning that probably, we see that the way to get to high equality is not totally obvious when see these results because even within a lot of countries with similar educational systems, and similar features of society, there is still variation. And the second point is that is cross country differences are not that large, meaning that in all societies actually there is a lot of inequality of opportunity. And this is something which in the policy discourse in some countries get lost. So I’m from Germany, and I know the policy discourse in Germany quite well and I always get the impression that the ideas are that in Finland, there would be perfect equality, but that’s certainly not the case. So there’s still a very high level of sibling similarity in education also in Finland. So we’re talking about differences between countries – Yes, they are, they are there, but compared to the overall level how much similarity across siblings is there? In a society these cross-country differences are not that large.

Christine Garrington  11:07  

It is complex research. You know, you talked earlier about the harmonising of the data sets, etc. Really, really complex work with some complex results. But would you say for policymakers, particularly there are any clear messages or takeaways here around that policy discourse that you were alluding to?

Michael Grätz  11:24  

I think, probably the clearest message coming out from that results is that these simple ideas. And there are some simple ideas about around so for instance, this idea that inequality in education is largely related to income inequality in a country. The findings of our, our research, they are basically saying that these simple ideas don’t work in the sense that they may explain, they may be explaining something but they’re not going to explain everything. So there’s probably so there’s more inequality in education opportunity in countries where there is income inequality, but still, this doesn’t explain all the cross country variation. That’s what I wanted to say. The second point, I think, for policymakers is also to be aware of that in all countries, there is inequality in education. And that probably has to do with the fact that this is has also to do two processes happening outside of the school system. So this is why reforms of the educational system, they will never fully address equality of opportunity because there are processes occurring within families. They are also contributing to inequality of educational opportunity. And I think this is something that policymakers should be at least aware of.

Christine Garrington  12:37  

Sibling Similarity in Education Across and Within Societies is research published in Demography by Michael Grätz and colleagues as part of DIAL’s Equal Lives project. You can find out more on the project website at equal-lives.org and about the wider DIAL programme at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by me Chris Garrington.

Why and how do rich parents have rich children?

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In Episode 12 of Series 3 of our podcast, Jamie Hentall MacCuish from University College London and the Institute for Fiscal Studies discusses findings  from DIAL’s TRISP project on the intergenerational elasticity of earnings or why rich parents have rich children. 

The Intergenerational Elasticity of Earnings: Exploring the Mechanisms is a DIAL Working Paper. 

 

 

Transcript

Christine Garrington 0:00

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series three we’re discussing emerging findings from DIAL research. For this episode, we’re talking to Jamie Hentall MacCuish from University College London and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He’s been investigating why rich parents have rich children. I started by asking him to explain the background to the research.

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 0:26

If you will permit me I think it’s a bit hard to answer that question without very quickly saying what the paper is about. So in it, we decompose the intergenerational elasticity of earnings or the IGE, which is the correlation between parents and children’s earnings. And we do this to try and understand what mechanisms transmit privilege from one generation to the next. We were using this dataset – the national cohort data study or NCDS – for another paper with a slightly different focus, and we realised the data set offered a unique window into the mechanisms affecting the IGE. Now the NCDS follows a single cohort of people born in a particular week in 1958. From the moment of their birth, up until now as they approach retirement. And it really is a globally unrivalled resource for social scientists due to its combination of information about family background, parental effort and time investment in their children and children’s ability, educational outcomes and later life earnings. Having this information allows us to disentangle the relative importance of family background parental investments in children, further education and ability in explaining the correlation between parents’ and children’s earnings. Now, I mean, I’ve said it’s a globally unrivalled data set what really makes it globally unrivalled is how forward looking this policy was in 1958. I mean, other countries have since introduced similar datasets, but much later meaning that now we don’t have data that covers really most of the working life of these group of individuals, which really makes it a fascinating window into what explains that intergenerational correlation in earnings or IGE.

Christine Garrington 2:10

What exactly was it about having wealthy or poor parents that you wanted to get to grips with specifically in this piece of research?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 2:19

Why wealthy parents have wealthy children and vice versa? So the children of rich families tend to differ from the poorer peers in multiple ways. They have fewer siblings and a more and more educated parents, their parents spend more time with them and send them to better quality schools. Their cognitive skills are higher at the end of compulsory education, and they complete more years of total education. All these channels have been found to affect an individual’s earnings. But in order to design policies to improve intergenerational mobility, we need to understand the relative importance of these channels and how they interact with each other to generate correlations in lifetime earnings.

Christine Garrington 3:00

Okay, so what did you actually do then once you know, once you sort of started digging into the data, what did you actually do?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 3:06

A multi-level mediation analysis. Basically, that means we work backwards to see how much of the IGE is explained by each mechanism. So that’s probably pretty cryptic. But in the first level, that we started at we only allow for direct effects on a child’s earnings of the years in education, their cognitive ability, the quality of the school they attended, and the parental investment they received and their family background. So in this first level, for example, we find that education accounts for 43% of the IGE amongst females. However, in the next level, we account for the fact that other channels refer to events earlier in the child’s life, than total years of education because really, total years of education is determined by further education decisions. And so other events plausibly impact on the years of education. Once we account for both the direct effects as well as these indirect effects through years of education, the fraction of the IGE explained for females by education collapses to just 2% to continue with the example given earlier, and cognitive abilities at the end of compulsory schooling really explained most of this difference.

Christine Garrington 4:22

Can you help us unpack that a little bit Jamie? What does that actually imply?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 4:25

Once you account for cognitive ability at the end of compulsory schooling, the fact that children of richer parents spend longer in education doesn’t account for much of the persistence in earnings between generations. And then we then extend the analysis back to more levels to account for the fact that parental investments and stalling might, like school quality, might impact cognitive ability at 16. And that family background might impact parental investment decisions, or the parents’ choice of school.

Christine Garrington 4:52

You mentioned a little bit earlier about, you know, the amazing data resource that the NCDS is. Are we able to sort of tease out a little bit more about the sorts of things that people are asked in that study that would help you with, with this research?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 5:07

There are multiple things asked and multiple tests. So it’s not just survey questions. There were tests; reading tests, math tests administered to these children in schools. They measure their weight at birth, the researchers went into the children’s school and ask the teacher their impressions of how interested the mother and father are in the child’s education. With, it was asked how many outings the parents took their children on, and these are I mean, we combine all of these measures about parental investments into sort of using a latent factor analysis to tease out a measure of how much the parents invest in their children. And similarly, with the child’s ability, we have measures of reading scores, math scores, and then teacher ratings of these children on maths and reading ability. So I mean, it’s it’s a very, I could go on. It’s a very, very rich data set. And it’s yeah, it’s not just survey data. It’s tests administered medical information. Yes, it’s really quite detailed.

Christine Garrington 6:11

You’ve touched on this a little bit already. But when you looked at the data what were the key differences? Tell us more about the key differences that emerged between the children of wealthier and poorer parents.

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 6:23

The children of richer families tend to differ in multiple ways from their poorer counterparts: fewer siblings, more educated parents, better parental time investments and school quality investments, higher cognitive skills, and more years of total education. But for us, that was really just the jumping off point to then analyse which of these differences matter most to explain this correlation of earnings between parents and generations from this persistence of inequality from one generation to the next.

Christine Garrington 6:51

And you took into account obviously a range of other factors as well what factors mattered most in all of this and how did they play out?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 6:59

So once we accounted for all the levels of analysis, so the for the effect of a family background and early investment on cognition and years of education, what we found is that family background and investment in early childhood mattered the most, the relative importance being different for men and women. For women, the most important was family background followed by school quality. And for men, parental time investment mattered most followed by family background.

Christine Garrington 7:24

So this is all very interesting, but I’m wondering now you know what are the important takeaways from the research about this relationship between how well off a parent is and their child’s life lifetime income prospects, for example?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 7:38

It simply what factors we found mattered most? It seems that to explain the persistence of inequality in earnings across generations, early childhood investments and family background really matter the most. And higher educational choices, for example, aren’t one of the mechanisms generating persistence in inequality in earnings across generations.

Christine Garrington 8:02

Right, I wonder if there’s any more to say there about from a policy perspective, if you like for those committed to want to seek and create a more equitable, a fairer playing field for all children, regardless of their background and how rich their parents are, what sorts of things are most relevant? Are they the things that you’ve outlined already? Or is there anything more that they can take away from this?

Jamie Hentall MacCuish 8:21

Obviously, you want to be careful making too many policy suggestions off one piece of research, but that said, I think our research really is in alignment with a large and growing literature that says early childhood investments are one of the best levers available to reduce intergenerational inequality. I think anything the government, our research would say and so I think with a large growing body of research say, that anything government could do to reduce the inequality in investments in early childhood would be one of the most powerful mechanisms to reduce intergenerational inequality.

Christine Garrington 8:56

The Intergenerational Elasticity of Earnings: Exploring the Mechanisms is a DIAL Working Paper by Uta Bolt, Eric French, Jamie Hentall MacCuish and Cormac O’Dea from the Trends in Inequality: Sources and Policy or TRISP project . You can find out more on the DIAL website at dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which was presented by me, Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Death of James Law

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It is with great sadness that we that we announce the death of James Law, OBE, this October. James was Professor of Speech and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK, and project leader of Social InEquality and its Effects on child Development: A study of birth cohorts in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands (SEED).

In addition to leading the SEED project, James took an active role within the whole DIAL programme, including hosting one of DIAL’s internal workshops and being on the scientific organizing committee of the final conference.

An online Book of Condolence has been opened for all to share their memories and tributes.