Series 2

Podcast episodes from the Equal Lives project

In our second Series, researchers from DIAL’s Equal Lives project share findings from their project looking at how inequality impacts the lives of young adults.

How does economic disadvantage accumulate for single mothers?

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In Episode 7 of Series 2 of our podcast we talk with Professor Susan Harkness from the University of Bristol and PI of DIAL’s EQUAL LIVES project about how economic disadvantage accumulates for single mothers and the impacts on their income and risk of poverty of having a child and splitting up from a partner.

 

 

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 emerging findings from DIAL’s Equal Lives project. Our guest today is Professor Susan Harkness from the University of Bristol and PI of Equal Lives. She’s been looking at how economic disadvantage accumulates for single mothers, and the impacts on their income and risk of poverty of having a child and splitting up from a partner. I started by asking her about the background to her research.

Susan Harkness  0:28 

I think for a long time, there’s been an assumption that single mothers are more likely to be poor or living in low income because they’re not living with a male breadwinning partner. And I think one of the things that’s been much less well recognised is that in the US, but also elsewhere, single mothers are much more likely to be poor than single fathers and I think one of the reasons for this is not just that they don’t live with a partner, but also because they face an enormous economic hit because of motherhood. And I think the motherhood penalty. We know, we know it exists. We know mothers are much less likely to work than fathers. And when they do work, that they’re more likely to be paid less. And what I wanted to do was try and connect to this research with research from single parenthood to see what the impact on single mothers’ incomes was.

Christine Garrington  1:16 

So what was it here that you wanted to look at specifically and why then?

 

Susan Harkness  1:21 

Okay, so I wanted to think about why single mothers were more likely to have low income so what was the penalty to single motherhood? And in doing that, I wanted to think about single motherhood is a process that sort of evolves over the life cycle. So first of all, we know that mothers when they have children, they face this economic penalty in the labour market, and then when they separate, they’re left in this very vulnerable position because their employment earnings have just declined so much.

Christine Garrington  1:49

And for this research, where did you get your information from? And can you tell us sort of why it is a good source for for looking at these particular issues? 

Susan Harkness  1:58 

Yes, so we looked at data from the Panel Study for Income Dynamics and it’s a great source of data because it allows us to look at people over time. In the case of our study, we’ve followed them for over 10 years, since becoming mothers to look at what happened to their incomes around these kind of critical lifecourse transitions. One of the great advantages of it is that we can see how people were doing before they became single mothers and we can see how they were doing after and then we can kind of look at how each of these different life course events – motherhood, partnership dissolution – leads to changes in their economic circumstances. Another major advantage of this data is that it’s got a really large sample size, and therefore we can think a bit more also about the heterogeneity the experience of single mothers. And what we mean here is that we can think about whether all single mothers effectively look the same or whether different routes into single motherhood have a different impact on their incomes. So what we did in this particular case was think about how single mothers differ according to whether they were previously married. They were previously cohabiting, or indeed they were married at the time at which they had a child. And this is a group which is accounting for a sort of growing share of births in the US and indeed in the UK over time.

Christine Garrington  3:18 

Right now you started by comparing the incomes of single, cohabiting and married mothers, what did you, what did you actually see there?

Susan Harkness  3:26

So one thing that we see is, is I think fairly fairly well known but we know that for example, married mothers start from a position of having higher incomes than cohabiting mothers and single mothers. So there’s an income gradient with cohabiting mothers sitting somewhere in the middle. But what we also know is that the, the income composition of those families is quite different. So whilst in single mother families, women are indeed largely dependent on their own earnings, and to some extent on benefit receipts, in cohabiting and married mother families, there’s a much greater dependence of women on partner’s earnings. And indeed if you look at the earnings, of women within those different family types, they’re actually relatively similar. Married and cohabiting mothers tend to be more dependent on partners, whereas single mothers tend to be more dependent on their own earnings and on the state. 

Christine Garrington  4:22

Yeah, right – so what was the earnings impact of divorce or separation for each of these groups and were they larger for some than, than others?

Susan Harkness  4:29

Okay, so one of the things that we thought was really interesting is that if we look at what happens to women’s own earnings following the birth of a child, the biggest negative effect was for women who were previously married. So we’re not looking at wage effects specifically we’re looking at the combined effect of changes in wages and changes in working hours and indeed participation. What we see is that for married mothers, we find much greater reduction in self-sufficiency or increased economic dependence as a result of childbirth, amongst cohabiting mothers, among single mothers, we see a smaller earnings effect, so earnings declined by less. And what happens then if we look at the income within those families, is that if we consider what happens to the income of married mother families? In fact, what we find is that although earnings fall quite substantially amongst married mothers, these are compensated for by increases in fathers’ earnings who to tend to work longer hours and work more often when they have a child and therefore the overall impact on income is relatively small, whereas in single mother families, the birth of the child is associated with the fall in earnings and a really large impact on overall income.

Christine Garrington  5:42

Okay, and you also considered how the loss of a male partner’s income affected these separated and divorced mothers, what did you see there?

Susan Harkness  5:49

So what we see for the loss of a partner’s earnings is of course, married mothers tend to be partner to higher earning men and men who work more following the birth of a child and so when the partner leaves, we have a larger negative effect on their overall incomes. And part of this is because of the reduction in these married mothers’ own earnings following childbirth. And part of the reason for that is that the, they have, they have farther, further to fall. So the, the loss of father’s earnings fall this is somewhat greater.

Christine Garrington 6:19

Yeah, so quite a lot of information there. What do we learn from all of this? That’s new, Susan?

Susan Harkness  6:24

If we think about what happens within married couples, I think because marriage sort of provides some security, is thought to provide some security for those who have children that we tend to see greater levels of specialisation within those households. What this means is that women see their earnings fall farther than cohabiting are single mothers, and it becomes harder for them to recover those earnings should they, should they separate so the overall impact should they become single mothers on their own labour market income is greater than for these other family types. And what does this mean? It means that actually the separation from marriage tends to have worse consequences than it does if you become a single mother through separation from cohabitation or divorce. Whilst you might think, for example, that maintenance might help offset some of these costs associated with divorce. In fact, this is often not really, not really the case because the levels of maintenance payments are relatively small. What we find is actually that single parenthood, regardless of the route in by which you become a single mother, is really quite a leveller and women who were better off before see the largest falls in their income.

Christine Garrington 7:42

Okay, there was one other aspect of your research that really caught my eye and this was, these were your findings around what things are like for single moms who are living with parents. These are quite interesting, weren’t they?

Susan Harkness  7:51

Oh, I think this is, this is fascinating. So one of the things that I think increasing research is looking at is how, how single mothers maintain those sort of standard of, standard of living, when they’re not able to rely on their own earnings or indeed on the state. And we know that in the US around one in 10 single mothers are living with their own parents. And in in this study, we find that actually living with your own parents is a really important mechanism for boosting families’ income. And in fact, living with your own parents provides as much protection for household income as being married and a little more than if you find a new partner, for example. So it’s really, really important living with grandparents is a really important route to kind of maintaining your standard of living following parental separation. 

Christine Garrington 8:42

Important to acknowledge that the very rich data you used here is from the US but I wonder if you think that the picture might be reflected in the in the UK, where we are, and also possibly in other parts of Europe?

Susan Harkness  8:54

Yes, absolutely. So one of the things we know about the UK is that and indeed other parts of Europe is that motherhood is associated with even larger reductions in overall labour supply. So we know that women when they have children are perhaps less likely to work but also much more likely to work part-time. So the the numbers that are working full time are far lower, after having children in the UK and other European countries, many other European countries than in the US. So what we would expect to find is actually that the impact of single motherhood on income is going to be quite different. So in the case of in the case of the UK, what we might expect to see is that it sees large losses in earnings associated with losses in employment for motherhood, are probably going to have an even larger impact on their well being – their economic well being – should they, should they subsequently divorce. But on a more sort of positive note, I think what we have in many European countries is greater welfare support for, for single mothers which is, is much more significant for boosting their incomes. Although of course this has the further drawback that it can also discourage women from working or working longer hours because of the design of various welfare support systems.

Christine Garrington 10:18

Yeah, indeed. Now single mothers are a key area of interest for you as a researcher but also a really important group of people that policymakers are interested in and your research would seem to have quite clear and important ramifications and implications for welfare policy. Could you talk us through what you think those modifications are?

Susan Harkness  10:40

Yeah, so I think what one of the things we often see focused on when we think about single parents is what to do about father absence, in particular, how to make fathers pay maintenance, for example. But what our findings are suggesting is that actually, when we think about how to support single mothers incomes, we need to go much further than that. And in particular, one when we think about, for example, welfare to work policies, which focus on single, single mothers. It’s really the case that in my view, that these policies are something that happened far too late in the life course. So if mothers have already lost their jobs and their earnings potential has already been weakened as a result of motherhood, then trying to do something about that at the point at which they divorce seems to me to be far too late. If we look at other studies, more recently, they suggest that when mothers do well, those in single parent families do well as well. And if we think about policies to ensure that women are able to maintain their economic position after having children in the labour market, then we would want to think much more widely about policies such as childcare provision, which would allow mothers to work, reduce their economic dependence and improve their prospects should they separate.

Christine Garrington  12:00 

“Accumulation of economic disadvantage: the influence of childbirth and relationship breakdown on mother’s income and poverty risks” is research by Susan Harkness and is published in Demography. You can find out more about the Norface funded Equal Lives project at Equal-lives.org, and about the wider DIAL programme at dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington, edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

The Accumulation of Economic Disadvantage: The Influence of Childbirth and Divorce on the Income and Poverty Risk of Single Mothers is research by Professor Susan Harkness of the University of Bristol and is published in Demography.

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.

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.

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.

The work and family lives of women in Israel

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In the third Episode of Series 2 of our podcast looking at research emerging from the Equal Lives project, we talk to Zafer Büyükkeçeci from Humboldt University in Berlin and Professor Vered Kraus from the University of Haifa about their research, Work and family life courses among Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian Women in Israel. They use newly-available linked Census and administrative data to look at who leads a more advantaged or disadvantaged work-family life. They discuss how they created the life course groups, what they found and the implications of the research. 

 

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Unemployed parent? How does that affect a teen’s school choices and achievements?

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In the second Episode of Series 2 of our podcast looking at research emerging from the Equal Lives project, we talk to Jani Erola and Hannu Lehti from the University of Türku in Finland about their research, The heterogeneous effects of parental unemployment on siblings’ educational outcomes. They use high quality Finnish data and robust methods to see how having an unemployed parent affects how teenage children get on at school. They discuss their findings and what they might mean for those seeking to support the families of people out of work and to reduce inequalities over the life course.

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Do Nordic countries live up to their promise of creating fairer and more equal societies?

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In the first Episode of Series 2 of our podcast looking at research emerging from the Equal Lives project, we talk to Marika Jalovaara from the University of Türku in Finland and Anette Fasang from Humboldt University in Berlin about their research, Family Life Courses, Gender and Mid-Life earnings. The research explores whether the reputation of Nordic countries for having family friendly policies  that create a fairer and more equal society is deserved. Using register data from Finland, the researchers look at the earnings of adults based on their family lifecourse and reveal 2 groups of young adults who should be a focus for policy makers and researchers going forward. 

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