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How does economic disadvantage accumulate for single mothers?

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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

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.

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Why and how do rich parents have rich children?

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Documenting childhood inequalities and the case for early intervention

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Education pathways: how do they affect young people's job prospects?

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Modelling the LGBTQ workplace for new insights and understanding

Further links

• Queer(y)ing Agent-Based Modelling: An example from LGBTQ workplace studies is a DIAL Working Paper

Transcript

In Episode 9 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Professor Andrew King and Matt Hall from DIAL's CILIA-LGBTQI+ research programme discuss their work exploring how Agent Based Modelling (ABM) can contribute to the study of LGBTQ lives, and conversely, how theory and insights from LGBTQ studies can inform the practice of ABM. 

Queer(y)ing Agent-Based Modelling: An example from LGBTQ workplace studies is a DIAL Working Paper

Christine Garrington  0:00  

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the life course. In series three of the podcast, we’re discuss emerging findings from DIAL research. For this episode, I'm joined by Professor Andrew King and research fellow Matt Hall from the University of Surrey, to discuss new research, exploring how Agent Based Modelling (ABM) can contribute to the study of LGBTQ lives, and conversely how theory and insights from LGBTQ studies can inform the practice of ABM. Before Matt walked us through what they did, I asked them both to explain the backdrop to the research. 

Andrew King  0:35  

When we were putting the project together in the first place, I'd become aware of the potential of Agent Based Modelling to explore ideas and theories and policies, especially on topics with populations where there were quite different data sets available which could be combined and synthesised. And in the case of LGBTQ people. There are quite a lot of smaller qualitative studies using interviews and focus groups and other qualitative data. And then there are some surveys with quantitative data. There are also areas where data is very limited and missing, particularly in relation to bisexual, trans and queer people. Hence, Agent Based Modelling really offered the CILIA project a new way of addressing these issues and trying something quite different, and quite novel, but there is much more to it than that, as Matt will go on to explain. 

Matt Hall  1:43  

Yeah we're also keen to address what's previously been termed methodological binarism within the field. So as Andy's just mentioned, there are numerous smaller qualitative studies and some larger quantitative data sets available, but there's very little conversation going on between the two of them. So each of these types of study tends to form its own stream, and then with its own limitations, and we identify this as a particular barrier for forwarding intersectional insights within policy domains and responding to how unique inequalities can emerge at the intersections of different social identities. So, where the quantitative research isn't engaging enough with intersectionality, or smaller sub populations within LGBTQ qualitative research is then limited in its ability to demonstrate the wider implications or significance of the details that it focuses on. So, it needs to be able to demonstrate the cumulative impact of those details like intersectional experiences. And although it's complete misreading of intersectionality theory, there's this tendency for conversations about intersexual inequality, particularly in public and policy spheres, is to treat inequalities as simply additive to where experiences of inequality of just the sum of those afforded by each of the persons identities.

Christine Garrington  3:10  

Yeah, that's really interesting now you propose something that you describe in the paper as a double querying approach which clearly has a bit of a double meaning but I wonder if you can just explain to us what exactly you mean there?

Matt Hall  3:23  

Well, although this paper was mainly written with LGBTQ scholars in mind as our audience were really keen to not just make this a paper encouraging the uptake of Agent Based Modelling within the field. We wanted just as much to explore what insights the rich theoretical traditions of LGBTQ scholarship can bring to ABM as a developing methodology. So many of the normative methodological practices and judgments surrounding Agent Based Modelling are shaped by the academic fields that most frequently use it like artificial intelligence research, ecology and epidemiology, and we wanted to clearly present ABM as more of a tool that's flexible for the needs of different disciplines. So kind of demystifying it for many of its more quantitative oriented applications. And in doing this, we were particularly interested in exploring its compatibility with intersectional and queer perspectives, which are currently quite dominant paradigms within LGBTQ research. So although the paper introduces our own LGBTQ workplace model, and briefly summarises some of the results we found interesting. It is intended much more as a methodological paper, demonstrating what Agent Based Modelling can bring to LGBTQ research, and in turn, some of the challenges we had to negotiate in integrating it with intersectional and queer insight. 

Andrew King  4:47

Yes, we were very much wanting to speak to too often quite distinct audiences with this paper, and try to create space for thinking and dialogue, and we hope that this podcast will help with that sort of knowledge sharing and provoke new dialogue and engagement.

Christine Garrington  5:09  

So Matt, you're going to walk us through the detail of the research and then we'll get some final reflections from Andrew. So can we talk a bit more about what all this looks like in day-to-day life you use the example of career progression in the workplace. What was it here that you actually examined?

Matt Hall  5:23  

So, as well as intersectionality, the wider CILIA project is particularly focused on life course inequality. And to us, this means exploring how inequality emerges at different key stages in the life course and how these then intersect. So for example, someone may enter the workforce with a good education and strong mobility, and then face x amount of discrimination within their workplace. So we could then simply look at their final career outcome as a product of their ability and exposure to discrimination over time. But people's careers, just like the rest of their lives don't really fold out like that in such a linear way. There are key stages where being exposed to discrimination may have a larger impact than other stages, like when seeking a promotion or when aligned with other non-work-related experiences in someone's life, such as undergoing a gender transition, experiences of racial discrimination or in the case of bisexual employees, even the gender dynamics of their current relationships. Similarly, employees have a bounded agency in how they respond to and protect themselves from experiences of discrimination at work. Those able to move to less discriminatory workplaces. Some may be able to create straight or cisgender aliases for themselves, while others. Others try to avoid situations where gender or sexuality are discussed at all, and others still may even feel empowered to make themselves visible, and even instigate change within their workplaces. And then each of these strategies that someone chooses has its own consequences for that individual, but also cumulatively on their workplace environment. Of these options presented to LGBTQ people are also often contingent on the alignment of many of those other workplace and life course experiences that we've just spoken about. So rather than just a simple model predicting someone's final career outcome based on their assets and demographics. We wanted to explicitly model career progression as this process. Specifically, complex linear process involving interactions between people and their workplaces, various degrees of autonomy and outcomes that are somewhat path dependent. We also wanted to explore the extent to adding complexity, particularly intersectional would impact overall outcomes, in essence, demonstrating how small qualitative details, often omitted from simpler linear models can have significant affect in terms of quantifiable outcomes.

Christine Garrington  8:04 

So imagine this was no straightforward process how exactly did you go about it?

Matt Hall  8:10  

So because of conceptualising career progress as a complex and interactive process using simulation methodology, in this case Agent Based Modelling just made complete, complete sense to us. However, we did still need to significantly simplify, how we represented career progression in the model. So in order to keep the model simple enough to explore and to understand the causal mechanisms behind any interesting emergent behaviours, we ended up representing three idealised stages in an individual's career – so school to work transition, a mid-career transition, and then a transition into retirement. And each LGBTQ citizen in the model, so our agents, were all distributed an LGBTQ status, so whether they were lesbian, gay, bisexual, male, trans, female, etc, and an ethnicity and social class, and then also with other characteristics like ability and access to social capital being proportionately distributed according to these identities and based on existing survey data. Then during each time step in the simulation, or every year, each agent has a probability of entering one of these career transitions based on their age. And the success of each of these transitions are based on a number of factors such as their ability for success of their last transition experiences of discrimination, and in some scenarios, we also included social capital, and individual's identity management practices as additional factors, and we were then able to explore the cumulative impact of these career transitions on overall career outcomes for individual agents, across the whole population of agents, for particular identity groups, and across the different intersections of those identity groups as well.

Christine Garrington  10:00

And what did you see from the different scenarios that you modelled?

Matt Hall  10:04  

Firstly, when exploring the impact of the different model scenarios on workplaces, and their discriminatory practices, we found that increasing complexity and the agency of LGBTQ workers to for example move workplaces if unhappy, and manage their identity in different ways, didn't have that much impact on reducing the discriminatory practices of the average workplace. This tended to be fairly low and stable over all the model runs, it did significantly impact the discriminatory practices of most discriminatory workplaces. Although interestingly, this didn't necessarily correspond with improved career equality for the agents themselves, in fact it tended to be the simplest scenarios that saw the largest improvements to LGBTQ career equality over time. With career equality here being the correlation between each individual's ability, and their career outcome.

Christine Garrington  10:58 

Okay and there were differences within the group that you were looking at also. What did you see that seemed important there?

Matt Hall  11:03  

Yeah, so, generally, we saw that the more complex, or the more detailed the theory that we implemented the more career inequality we observed between different LGBTQ strands. So, in the simplest scenarios where all agents experienced different levels of discrimination during their career transitions, based on LGBTQ ethnic and class status. In these, the different identity groups would end up with different career outcomes, but based purely on these initial levels of discrimination. The actual trajectories would be more or less the same between them. So career equality steadily increasing over time for everyone, and at a similar rate. However, over the different scenarios, as we incrementally increased complexity in the career progression process like adding in social capital as a factor mediating people's capacity to move to better workplaces, and their identity management practices and intersectional variations, we began to see different trajectories emerging through equality between each of the different LGBTQ strands and between the intersections, within each of those strands.

Christine Garrington  12:13 

And other factors such as someone's background or ethnicity, they were also important weren’t they?

Matt Hall  12:18

Yeah, so for example, in the most complex scenarios, whilst career equalities steadily increased over time for the overall agent population, when we then aggregate down - desegregate down to the non-white working class trans and queer agents we observed the complete opposite trajectory happening. So a fairly dramatic reduction in this case in career equality, over time, and this highlighted to us firstly how just fairly small intersectional differences in the career progression process cumulative - can accumulate significantly over the life course in somewhat less predictable ways than linear models would usually predict. So, a minor reduction in an individual's behavioural opportunities like moving to a better workplace or feeling confident enough to disclose their sexual or gender identity in the workplace can set the same individual on completely different trajectories in terms of career outcome over time. And secondly, it highlights the importance of aggregating down to much smaller intersections of population in our models, something that traditional quantitative methods struggle with due to losing statistical significance when aggregating down to smaller samples. And it's been an ongoing problem for research on LGBTQ populations in general, let alone when we start introducing intersections with other identities like ethnicity, and social class.

Christine Garrington  13:46  

Such a really important and major piece of work from you both. I wonder what you take away from this and how it can inform policymakers and employers who are interested in reducing inequalities for LGBTQ workers.

Matt Hall  14:00 

in terms of informing policymakers, our model hopefully demonstrates the importance of considering the impact of intersectional experiences on career inequality. So currently, both wider equality legislation across Europe and more localised workplace policies, tend to be single issue in their approach to social inequalities. For example, they'll have one policy for addressing LGBTQ issues, one for gender, and another for race, disability, etc. And because of this they very rarely address some of the more complex experiences occurring at the intersection of these identities, there seems to be this underlying assumption, that simply addressing the concerns of each of an identity category separately will automatically meliorate all of the problems emerging at the intersections of them. And as we mentioned earlier, this comes from assuming that inequality is additive or a simple sum of each experience of inequality, whereas what we've hopefully demonstrated with our model is that inequality synergized in much more complex ways than this, and that we need to encourage more intersectionally aware policymaking. For example, this may be race policies that acknowledge that many ethnic minority individuals are also gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and likewise LGBTQ policies that explicitly address how some LGBTQ employees will also be from ethnic minority backgrounds, different social class backgrounds, and have different abilities and neuro diversities for example, and that a one size fits all approach to LGBTQ equality, may not even begin to start addressing those individual needs at all.

Andrew King  15:38  

Yeah, we don't really see what we've done is purely a thought experiment or all about advancing theory and methodology although those things are important in the way we've described. We think that what we're doing can help to shape policy. And what we're aiming to do a little later in the project is to really engage, policymakers, and employers in these conversations.

Christine Garrington  16:07 

Queer(y)ing Agent-Based Modelling: An example from LGBTQ workplace studies is a DIAL Working Paper by Matt Hall and colleagues. It's part of DIAL’s CILIA-LGBTQI+ project, which is providing cross cultural evidence for the first time ever on life course inequalities experienced by LGBTQI+ people. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

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Mums who smoke and their baby's birthweight

Transcript

In Episode 7 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Rita Pereira from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and a member of DIAL’s Gene Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities(GEIGHEI) project, talks about her research looking at the links between mothers’ smoking and their baby’s birthweight.

The Interplay between Maternal Smoking and Genes in Offspring Birth Weight is a DIAL Working Paper by Rita Dias Pereira, Cornelius Rietveld and Hans van Kippersluis.

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 research. Our guest today is Rita Pereira from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, she has been looking at the relationships between genes, smoking and birth weight. I started by asking her about the background to the research.

Rita Pereira  0:22  

So this research has been funded by NORFACE grant. And this grant had the idea of studying gene and environment, and particularly how they interact to generate health and education inequalities. So in other words, what this means is, we already know that both genes and environment matter for generating inequalities. But our question was whether there are particularly harmful or beneficial combinations of genes and environments, in determining inequalities. In this setting, we know that maternal smoking during pregnancy is harmful for the baby. And it is reflected in a low birth weight. And we also know that your genetic constituency will determine partially how heavy or light you're going to be born. So the question here is whether there are combinations that are particularly harmful for you.

Christine Garrington  1:26  

Okay, so what was it about mothers who smoke that you specifically wanted to look at and why?

Rita Pereira  1:32  

So we wanted to know whether smoking was particularly harmful for babies, depending on their children. So other possibility was also that some genetic variants protect you against smoking? Right? So in the end, the was not so much about the mothers who smoke, we know that smoking has detrimental effects for the baby. But we wanted to know if the risk of smoking would differ depending on the genes of the offspring.

Christine Garrington  2:01

Right. Okay, so your information came from two great data sources, I wonder if you can tell us something about them? You know, the detail how many people were involved? How those datasets work? and What people are asked that was relevant to your research?

Rita Pereira  2:14  

Our main data set was a data set called ALSPAC, ALSPAC, which is from the UK, and it's a incredible data set is very detailed. And it followed pregnant women and their children that were born in the 90s, in area of risk though. And it's great for us because it has genetic information, both on the mother, on the baby. And it also has biomarkers so there are urine samples, blood samples that were collected from the mother, when they were pregnant. And it has 5000 to mother baby pairs, that are, that have genetic information on both the mother and the baby. And then we wanted to replicate our findings. And for that we use the UK Biobank. So as the name indicates, is also a dataset from the UK, and is a huge data set. So it has 500,000 individuals that are genotyped. But for our study, it has less variables that are relevant. So for example, we don't have maternal genetic information, and we don't have biomarkers during pregnancy.

Christine Garrington  3:28  

So in order to get a clearer picture you needed to get around this issue of simply comparing mothers who smoke with mothers who don't, so what did you do there?

Rita Pereira  3:37 

So endogeneity is a problem that arises if you just compare mothers who smoke with mothers who don't smoke. And the problem is that smoking is likely to be a result of other variables such as stress, social class, education, maybe personality traits. So if you just compare mothers who smoke with mothers who don't smoke, you might attribute a low birth rate to smoke while in reality, there are other factors driving the low birth weight. So our first step was to solve this issue. And to be able to solve this issue, we instrumented the decision to smoke. So an instrument is a variable that causes smoking, but doesn't cause anything else.

Christine Garrington  4:23  

And how did you do that in your research?

Rita Pereira  4:25

Our instrument was a single snip. So a single snip is a single genetic variant that causes an increase in cigarette smoke a day. In this snip is a is located in a nicotine receptor snip, so people think that it might have to do with how people get addicted and how their body simulates nicotine. We use this snip and we also show that it only correlates with birth weight on mothers who smoke so indicating that there is no effect from this snip on birth rates in mothers who don’t smoke, which is what we want. And we also find that it doesn't really correlate with other variables that are correlated with smoking. Such as age at delivery, whether they're married or single, the social class, education. So it seems that they've having snip is somehow random. And then this snip increases the frequency of smoking. So we use that to do with endogeneity.

Christine Garrington  5:18  

So that was the first issue you dealt with, that you need to overcome. You also needed to deal with this whole question of under reporting, didn't you? This question of people not necessarily giving the full picture or telling the full story because they feel they might be judged in some way, especially about something like smoking.

Rita Pereira  5:35

So usually mothers are not very comfortable reporting that they smoked during pregnancy, because it's somehow taboo, or they don't feel comfortable or they feel may be judged. So we were worried that the reporting they're reporting to smoke was incorrect. So this is where ALSPAC is a really great data set, because they collected urine of the mothers when they were pregnant, and they tested for cotinine. And cotinine is a byproduct of nicotine that stays in your system for far longer than nicotine that so it stays in your system for a few days. And that's what usually people test when you want to check if you're a smoker or not. So we had this variable. And then what we found is that while 22 mothers reported that they smoked, actually 31% had enough cotinine in their system to be considered active smokers. So that was the second problem that we needed to solve. And after we solve this issue, we will find that one extra cigarette per day decreases the baby's birth weight by by 20 to 40 grams.

Christine Garrington  6:43  

Right, so there was a there was a sort of a clear link there. And you were able to predict a baby's tendency to be born larger and heavier. How did you get that information? And what did that tell you?

Rita Pereira  6:53 

So we constructed a score, which is based on the the baby's genetic data, I mean, they're not babies now. But they were because then. So based on their genetic data, we can construct a score that gives us the child's predisposition to be born with a low or high birth weight. So just to give you an idea of how predictive this correlates, one standard deviation below or above the mean, means that you're going to be born around 100 to 110 grams lighter.

Christine Garrington  7:25  

Pulling all of this together, what would you say that we learn overall, beyond what most of us know about smoking being bad for our health and the health of our children?

Rita Pereira  7:34  

First and foremost this research highlights how harmful the nicotine effect is on your baby. But besides that, we also want to check whether the risks differ between the babies when we don't find any evidence for meaningful interactions. So this leads us to conclude that the effects seem to be the same for all babies, regardless of their genome. Okay, so it affects every baby apparently, the same more or less the same.

Christine Garrington  8:03  

Do you have any plans then to take this work further?

Rita Pereira  8:06

Yeah, we do, actually. Because now we found this great data set that allows us to have a really cool instrument, and correct for under reporting. So it's definitely in our plans to check whether smoking has other harmful effects, maybe in other outcomes. And besides that, we also wanted to look at gene environmental interactions, maybe in other contexts, such as mental health, education, and so on.

Christine Garrington  8:33  

The Interplay between Maternal Smoking and Genes in Offspring Birth Weight is a DIAL Working Paper by Rita Pereira and colleagues involved in the GEIGEI project. You can find out more about the project at gene-environment.com, 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 and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

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Working with migrants: does it increase or decrease support for anti-immigration political parties?

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the life course. In this series we discus emerging findings from DIAL research. My guest today is Sirus Dehdari from the Swedish Institute for Social Research at Stockholm University, who was part of the DIAL’s Populism, Inequality and Institutions project, has been looking at whether support for anti-immigration, political parties, increases or decreases when native born voters work alongside migrants. I started by asking him about the social and political backdrop to the research.

Sirus Dehdari  0:31  

I'm sure both you and your listeners know that we've seen a rather large increase in immigration to most European countries in the last couple of decades. In some EU countries the share of foreign born is around the close to 10% and is in a few cases is approaching 50%. At the same time, we've seen that several countries, several of these countries, are also seeing how anti-immigration parties are increasing their support. So, one might be tempted to conclude that the former is actually causing the latter, meaning that increasing immigration is causing opposition to immigration. And there are several, several studies in political science, sociology and some in economics that consider within countries, regional variation in immigration and voting for these types of policies, and they find a positive correlation or in some cases, a positive causal relationship between these two phenomena. But there are also studies that find either no correlation, or even in some cases, a negative relationship between the presence of immigrants or the visibility of immigrants and support for anti-immigration policies. It seems that there are some local and perhaps regional conditions that influences how immigration is affecting opposition to immigration. For instance, the skill level of the newly arrived immigrants compared to the skill level of the natives, or the socio-economic status of the natives in the neighbourhoods where immigrants are placed, if they are placed, or where they choose to settle. And another important factor that been seen in the literature is the type of contact that occurs when navies and immigrants interact, which is simplified a bit by separating these types of contact into two categories: basic superficial and meaningful contact, where the former is basically just seeing immigrants at the local supermarket or on your daily commute to work without really interacting with them or getting to know them, while meaningful contact would involve getting to know each other or cooperating towards a common goal. Superficial contact might actually increase opposition to immigration, but we believe that meaningful and cooperative interactions or meaningful and cooperative integral contact between native and immigrants, we believe that they're expected to reduce opposition. So this is basically the political and social setting that got us to start thinking about our project.

Christine Garrington  3:12  

Yeah, that's great. And so what then specifically was it that you wanted to look at and why? 

Sirus Dehdari  3:17  

What we set out to do is to look and investigate how contact between natives and immigrants in the workplace influences opposition to immigration. And why is this important? Well, first of all the workplace is a very important social setting for most working adults, where we spend a large amount of our time. And many workplaces are characterised by teamwork, where we would expect this type of meaningful and cooperative contact that I mentioned earlier. And second, immigrant co-workers might actually signal to natives that immigrants are indeed here to lower their wages to take away their high wages. So, we have two potential effects going in opposite directions. And this is why we have found that this particular setting, the workplace, to be very interesting, interesting in terms of its effect on the opposition to immigration. 

Christine Garrington  4:10  

So what do you actually do with this particular piece of research and where did you get your information from?

Sirus Dehdari  4:16  

So we use Swedish registered data, where we are able to connect almost all of working adults to a specific workplace, so we know which firm they work at, but we also know which actual workplace that work at, so their physical address. For each native worker, we compute the share of non-European co-workers and this is basically a measure of the type of, or the amount of meaningful and cooperative contact that each native has. The government that people voted for, but we are able to aggregate these individual level shares, workplace contact shares, to the smallest political geographical unit, which is the election precinct. So, we aggregate this to the precincts and we create a share of non-European co-workers among the average native born worker living in that precinct. At the precinct level, we also have election results, we know the share of votes for Social Democrats or the Green Party and so on. And which means that we also know the share of votes for the Sweden Democrats, which is the Swedish version of an anti-immigration and xenophobic type of party. A typical party that exists in many other European countries. We match this to the precinct level and then we conduct the analysis on this geographical unit. 

Christine Garrington  5:37 

I see, and what did what did you find when you did that matching when you match those things together?

Sirus Dehdari  5:41 

We find that an increase in the share of non-European co-workers decreases support for the Sweden Democrats. What does this mean? Well, it means that non-European co-workers might signal or might highlight the threat of increased labour market competition amongst the natives working at that particular workplace. This is offset by the potential benefits stemming from, from meaningful and cooperative workplace contact. So at the end, the net effect of additional immigrant co-worker is lower support for anti-immigration parties. 

Christine Garrington  6:15 

So Sirus, you went on and dug a little deeper into the level of skills of the non-natives. Can you tell us a bit about why you did that, and what you found there?

Sirus Dehdari  6:25  

If you consider the two types of contact that I mentioned earlier, and also to consider what I mentioned about the immigrants in the workplace highlighting the threat of labour market competition and natives’ access to employment and high wages, we expect immigrants of the same skill to highlight this treat even more. So consider a native working in a workplace and then his or her new manager is a foreign-born immigrant or non-European. If the native is for instance a carpenter or a plumber, she might not feel threatened, in the same extent, as if the new co-worker was actually a plumber, or a carpenter or performing a skill, performing tasks that is similar to a task the native is performing. For this reason, we might actually expect that the threat of labour market competition only highlighted or id more highlighted when immigrants of the same skill appear in the workplace. But at the same time, we will also expect natives and immigrants of the same skill to be involved in even more cooperative tasks. So, we might not expect the plumber and the manager to share tasks, even if they share the same goal, that would be the profit of the company, we might not expect them to work towards that goal in the same manner. So even in this case of the same skill contact, we might expect the threat to be highlighted even more, but also the contact to be even more  meaningful and more cooperative. The net effect is still ambiguous. So what we do is that we separate between having co-workers of the same skill  and having co-workers of the opposite skill and then we estimate the effect of these, these average shares, again on support for the Sweden Democrats and what we find is that the results, the negative results that we saw in the main results, or the baseline results are solely driven within skill contact. So the estimate is still negative for within skill contact but for opposite skill contact, we find basically nothing. And what does this mean? Well, it means that even in this case of the presence of within-skilled non-Europeans, where we expect labour market competition to be more highlighted, the benefits of meaningful workplace contact is still offsetting this potential negative impact of opposition to immigration. And at the same time, we don't find anything for our cross-skilled contact, which means that we shouldn't expect, for instance, low educated workers and high educated workers to actually interact, regardless of the type of interaction is superficial or if it's meaningful. And at the same time, we shouldn't expect natives of a particular skill to feel threatened when immigrants of the opposite skill are present at the workplace.

Christine Garrington  9:24  

Yeah, that's really interesting. So I wonder if I can ask you whether it mattered if the job was say under threat from something like computerization or artificial intelligence or something where you know those sorts of developments might be taking place within a company setting?

Sirus Dehdari  9:41  

So what I’ve said so far is basically that labour market threat is highlighted when immigrants become visible in the workplace. However, and as I just mentioned, comparing within skill and across skill, we said that we might not expect natives of a particular skill to be threatened when immigrants of the opposite skill appear in the workplace because they don't compete. Another way to think about this is that natives that do not feel that their employment is actually under threat, they will not feel even more threatened when immigrants become visible in the workplace. So basically, what we wanted to do is that we wanted to separate occupations into secure and non-secure, or vulnerable and non-vulnerable occupations. And to do so we use a routine task index score, which determines the probability or the threat of a particular occupations tasks to be replaced by computers. More or less in occupations with a high routine task index score the workers there are under the threat of being replaced and what we do is similar to what we do within the cross-skilled contact which is to separate, again we separate occupations into vulnerable and non-vulnerable occupations and then we re-estimate the model again. And what we find is that the negative effect that we found from the contact between natives and immigrants in the workplace only appears when natives are occupied in non-vulnerable occupations. So when they are basically less threatened by automation and computerization. On the other hand, if we consider natives employed in vulnerable sectors, we actually find a positive relationship, so when immigrants are visible in in these workplaces, natives are actually more likely to oppose immigration.

Christine Garrington  11:35

So Sirus, just finally then I wonder what you feel we learn from all of this? There's quite a lot of important insights I think that are coming out of this work. But what would you say are   the key takeaways?

Sirus Dehdari  11:47  

The main takeaway is that similar to other studies that have found that cooperative and meaningful contact, integral contact between members of different groups, for instance ethnic groups or religious groups, is that the contact really matters, the type of contact matters. If we are interested in reducing opposition to immigration for instance, we have to facilitate these types of contact, for instance through the workplace but also through the different social settings, for instance different sporting events. So the results I believe are not specific to the workplace but can also be extended to other important social settings. 

Christine Garrington  12:25

Workplace Contact and Support for Anti-Immigration Parties is a DIAL Working Paper by Henrik Andersson and Sirus Dehdari. You can find the paper and more about the wider DIAL research programme at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. and don't forget to subscribe to the DIAL podcast, to access earlier and forthcoming episodes.

Listed in: Education

From outcast to citizen: the time travels of LGBTQI+ elders

From outcast to citizen: the time travels of LGBTQI+ elders

In Episode 5 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Ana Cristina Santos from the CILIA project talks about her research looking at the life experiences of LGBTQI+ people in Portugal. Ana Cristina  from the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra has has been speaking with older people about what it was like for them growing up and living in times when gender and sexual diversity was prohibited.

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the life course. In this series we discus emerging findings from DIAL research. My guest today is Ana Cristina Santos from the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimb. She's a member of the DIAL CILIA project which is investigating and comparing intersectional life inequalities, amongst LGBTQI plus citizens in England, Scotland, Portugal, and Germany. Ana Christina has led the work in Portugal. I started by asking her about the social and political backdrop to the research.

Ana Cristina Santos  0:34  

First of all, Portugal had the longest dictatorship in southern Europe. This was 48 years, longer than Spain, longer than Italy. And during that time, our homosexuality was a crime punished with up to two years in prison. Of course, then came democracy in 1974, but it took eight long years already in democracy, before the legal ban on homosexuality was revoked. And another 19 years for the first LGBT right to be approved in Parliament. That referred to same sex unions already in 2001. So, this overwhelming reluctance in making legal changes during almost two decades, illustrates the power of heteronormativity and cisgender normativity as well. These tacit norms, carry on informing social practices and cultural values today, even when Portugal is currently perceived to be at the forefront of LGBTQI rights recognition on a global scale. We've got same sex parenting rights fully protected. We've got a gender identity law based on self-determination, and also the ban of binary surgeries on intersex new-borns. So, this is the context in which we have conducted our research.

Christine Garrington  1:53  

So wonder if you can tell us a bit now then about what you actually did? Specifically who you spoke to for this research and why?

Ana Cristina Santos  2:00  

The work we did in Portugal was developed by a team of two research fellows and myself, and together we spoke to almost 60 participants from a range of generations from 18 year olds onwards, and we were focusing on on transitions into adulthood, and the challenges of midlife career. The so called rush hour of life. In my case I was interested in the intersections of ageing and sexuality. More specifically, I wanted to explore the impacts today on later life, of having been raised as a child, and as a young person in a time when sexual and gender diversity was prohibited. In order to do that I spoke to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, gays in Portugal, who were between 60 and 75 year old at the time of the interview. Many of them have never given an interview before which made it absolutely fascinating for me as a researcher, and the questions, aimed at covering three transition points in life. School to work transitions, employment progression into midlife and the transition into retirement and indications for end of life.

Christine Garrington  3:14  

So how did the people you spoke with describe their early lives as school children or students?

Ana Cristina Santos  3:19  

Most were in the most absolute closet at least until they left the parental home and got their first jobs. You see, the legal ban on homosexuality until 1982 was endorsed by the dominant socio-cultural context. Which offered a double mechanism of vigilance against sexual and gender diversity, even if the fear of being arrested was not part of the daily concerns, the power of social control could not be ignored. Many felt isolated and thought there was nobody else in the world who felt the way they did and experienced the same type of emotions and desires. They knew it had to remain a secret well kept. During that time, most people I spoke to were students. They were engaging for the first time in practices and behaviours, that often contrasted with their peers. Blurring the rigid boundaries of gender roles and gender-based expectations. Some of them received verbal and physical abuse from parents, from older siblings, based on being perceived as different, but not necessarily at school where they seem to have found space for discovery and same sex, intimacy, especially in a highly gendered setting.

Christine Garrington  4:34  

Now you were particularly struck by their strategies for earning the respect of peers, tell us a bit about that.

Ana Cristina Santos  4:39  

Yes, a striking finding was what I'm calling an “outdoing strategy”, or a narrative of excellency. To which interviewees proactively invested in performing better than average at school or the workplace later on. So, one of my interviewees, Adolfo, a cisgender gay man, between 70 and 74 years old, he said, “I had always this thing of making an effort studying, being an intellectual, the best student. It comes from there, from the fact that I was an outsider. I had to be the best” end of quote. So, this is just one example amongst many of the super queer narratives, a self-imposed pressure to excel in school and in their jobs is a form of protection against potential backlash, including discrimination and violence. This idea that I had to be the best of the having itself as a student worker, I earned my spot under the sun, they could not attack me. I earned their respects through intelligence, hard work, bravery, or by becoming the boss, this is the general line of of arguing. Throughout the interviews, there were plenty of descriptions of such out student’s strategies.

Christine Garrington  5:59  

So what did you learn then about your participants working lives, you know, set against the backdrop of the 1974 Revolution, a new constitution deemed at the time to be one of the most gender equal in Europe.

Ana Cristina Santos  6:11  

First of all, during the late 80s, during the 90s, early 2000s Most participants had a full-time job, And were engaged in securing their posts and investing in their career development. Most remained in the closet in relation to their co-workers or line managers. Some reported that they were outed or suffered indirect discrimination, by being perceived as lesbian, bisexual or gay. This is also a time when the world was struggling with the AIDS crisis and stigma and backlash, but also a time when many of us witnessed profound changes in the law and policy regarding equality indifference towards a rights-based approach. Note for instance that in the 2000s, banning homophobic laws including different ages of consent, became a fundamental criteria for joining the EU. And this added pressure to already member states to comply with the equality policies. It was during this period that Portugal became the first European country. And the fourth worldwide, to include sexual orientation in its constitution in the non-discrimination clause. However, that's time despite this, striking legal progress, the social context, remain hostile to diversity, encouraged the closets, particularly with sphere of employment. In some of the stories we gathered there was this ongoing normalising threat, what I'm currently exploring as an undoing strategy in sharp contrast with the outdoing strategy found in other trajectories, especially in relation to school years. So, this undoing strategy consists of keeping your head down, avoiding attentions becoming sort of invisible. This idea that I was never discriminated against because I wouldn't talk about it in the workplace. I was always very discreet, it was my personal life. I wouldn't want to mix things. So one of the participants, Manuel, as cisgender, gay men in his 60s, he says, “I always tried to be respected at the workplace and do my job and get along with colleagues, participate in everything. I was never very extravagant or scandalous, and people in a way, even liked to me, because I still have colleagues who, even today, like me” end of quote. So, the idea of being respected because one is well behaved, was part of the, of the stories I gathered.

Christine Garrington  8:53  

Now it was in 2010 that numerous LGBT rights were enshrined in law, which of course will have benefited the younger generations and society more broadly, but what about your participants who by that time were either retired or approaching retirement?

Ana Cristina Santos  9:07  

Well, legal change came about in Portugal, in the early 21st century, and you're right set to mention 2010 because it was the year when, same sex marriage was finally approved. And in the years immediately after that, rights regarding same sex parenthood, self-determining gender recognition, and the ban of surgeries on intersex new-borns were enacted. The amounts and speeds of fundamental changes, offer a sharp contrast with the lives, LGBTQ elders lead. And I'll give you two quotes from two different interviewees. The first is from Annabella, a cisgender lesbian in her 60s, and she says, “I wish I could move in a community, so to speak with like-minded people, because as you get older, what are you left with? Friendship, tenderness, cuddles, to find a like-minded partner would be like winning the lottery”, and another interview, Manuel, cisgender gay man also in his 60s. He says, “the future, the future I mean, what can you expect right, it will get worse and worse each day. People look at you and think. Look at those filthy men, look at them, they’re old and haven't figured out the cure for themselves. When you're young, you're forgiven, but when your old”. And he doesn't even finish the sentence. So, these are the stories of those who within the span of 50 years have been fast forward from the past of criminalisation, to the future of same sex marriage and parenthood. So in other words, they were growing up, when being queer was a crime, and they're getting older, when marriage is here for all. The idea that it is already too late to come out. Why would you? I don't need it anymore? Is very present. When formal a recognition of LGBTQI rights seems to have arrived too late to trigger significant impacts on the daily management of life of these people.

Christine Garrington  11:18  

What would you say then Ana Christina are the key things to emerge from your research so far? What do we learn?

Ana Cristina Santos  11:23  

Okay, first of all, from, from the interviews, it was possible to really see the gendered impact of the process in later life. The impact of having been invisible for such a long time. So you see that men, self-identify as gay, whereas most women have been previously married to a man. And hence, self-identify as bisexual, even when that relationship was long time ago was their only relationship to a man, and all of their significant relationships throughout life have been with women. You see also that half of the sample was partnered, but the only woman who was amongst the partnered group was a transgender woman who transitioned recently and remained married to her long-life partner. In addition most partnered male elders are married, lesbian and bisexual women over 60 remain very vulnerable in old age. Since these are aspects associated with the gender impact of deposits in later life, but you could also see from the research the importance and fragility of informal networks of care, as many are either dependent on their younger partner, when there is one or relying on themselves only hoping for the best but expecting the worse. There are no end-of-life plans for the majority of people I spoke with. On a more positive note from the research also emerged the idea that now I am much freer to do whatever no expectations to meet. I'm untouchable because at the end of the day I cannot be fired – so a certain freedom from stress, anxiety or peer pressure, from or to out-do, had happened to them in the past. Having remained in a closet that was too large to be undone, and being deprived from socio-cultural conditions to build an autonomous network of kinship and care beyond the family of origin. This research informs the urgency of adequate legal and policy measures to counter the vulnerability that is already present.

Christine Garrington  13:40  

I was interested to know that you followed up your participants in light of what's been happening with the COVID 19 pandemic what’s emerged there?

Ana Cristina Santos  13:46  

We know that discrimination and inequalities are commulative. And that is why LGBTQI elders are twice as vulnerable compared to their straight or cisgender peers. We've also learned that vulnerability is aggravated in times of crisis, especially in terms of isolation, loneliness, the lack of extended networks of care. But you see the daily management of life before the pandemic was not so different after all from their current experience of confinement. Many LGBTQI elders were locked down, way before lockdown became a fashionable hashtag. That said, from the follow up, I did with about 1/3 of the interviewees, I noticed that many made an immediate link to what they had lived in the 80s with the AIDS crisis. And so this feeling of experiencing a pandemic for the second time when the first had devastating, personal and political consequences, has an impact on mental health and emotional well-being, bringing to the surface memories associated with fear and loss since the 80s. Digital illiteracy and poor health conditions also contributes to the difficulties in overcoming the current situation. 

Christine Garrington  15:10 

Finally, although we've talked mainly about Portugal today, the research is part of a wider project looking at other countries can you tell us something about that and where the project is going from here?

Ana Cristina Santos  15:20  

Sure. So, the CILIA LGBTQI plus project investigates potential inequalities experienced by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex people in four European countries, England, Germany, Portugal, and Scotland. Our aim is to provide original cross cultural evidence concerning life personal inequalities experienced by LGBTQI plus people with a particular focus on issues of employment and retirement. And in order to do so, we did an extended literature and survey review. We mapped and analysed social and political changes in all four contexts, and we conducted two hundred in depth qualitative interviews that amounts to almost 20,000 minutes of audio recording centred on the life course of self-identified LGBTQI plus people. And what we found is that despite progressive laws and social policies discrimination based on homo, bi, transphobia persists, especially in school and employments were being sexually and or gender diverse is perceived as potentially harmful for personal well being and for career development. Discrimination may no longer be found in books, but it is certainly to be found in action to change from direct to more subtle or tacit forms of prejudice, feeds this idea that discrimination and violence are ongoing. As a presence, regardless of legal protection, which can trigger disbelief and a sense of worthlessness. At the workplace, we found that coming out remains a challenge, and it is mostly done in relation to co-workers and not line managers as participants do not feel that their posts are secured, especially regarding the possibility of enjoying the pregnancy and parental leave. Across all age groups, there were consistent narratives of precariousness, absence of a sense of belonging to a political community and mental health issues.

Christine Garrington  17:34  

Ana Cristina Santos from DIAL’s CILIA LGBTQI plus project was talking to me, Chris Garrington for this episode of the DIAL podcast. You can find out more about the DIAL research programme at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. And don't forget to subscribe to the DIAL podcast, to access earlier and forthcoming episodes.

Listed in: Education

Born preterm or low weight? What could that mean for your relationships and wellbeing later on?

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the life course. In this series we are discussing emerging findings from DIAL research. Our guests today are Ayten Bilgin and Marina Mendonça from the PremLife project. They've been investigating the romantic and sexual relationships of adults who were born preterm or with a low birth weight, and the potential knock on effects of that on their physical and mental wellbeing.

Ayten Bilgin  0:27

So preterm birth is being born before 37 weeks of pregnancy, and low birth weight is being born weighing less than 2500 grammes. And research shows that these individuals are at a higher risk of having emotional problems in adulthood, such as depression and anxiety. They are more likely to be introverts, they are more likely to be shy and socially withdrawn, and they are less prone to risky behaviour, such as drug use from our own previous study, we also know that adults born preterm, tend to have lower educational qualifications, they are less likely to be employed, and they are more likely to receive social benefits in comparison to those born at term. In other words, being born preterm seems to contribute to having economic disadvantages to adulthood.what aspects of preterm or low weight baby's life

Christine Garrington  1:25  

What aspects of a preterm or low weight baby's life did you specifically want to look at? And why? And who was the focus of your research?

Ayten Bilgin  1:34

So in general, we were interested in how being born preterm or low birth weight influences their transition into adulthood, regarding their economic independence and social relationships, and in a previous study these child, these child I just briefly described, we showed that adults born preterm are more likely to have economy problems. But we were not sure if they were also likely to have more problems in their social relationships as well. So, this is important because having a close and intimate relationships, having found to increase wellbeing as well as good physical and mental health, and from previous research we know that preterm children struggle more to establish relationships with their peers. They're more likely to be shy and more likely to be victims of bullying, but it wasn't clear whether adults born preterm also face difficulties in establishing social relationships that are normative of adulthood. Such as initiating their sexual life, finding a partner and having children. 

Christine Garrington  2:45

And where did you get all your information from?

Ayten Bilgin  2:49

So what we did in the study is was a meta-analysis which is bringing together data from previous studies. We first started doing an expansive research looking into previous studies, which reported on adult and social relationships, after being born preterm or low birth rates. We found 21 studies from 12 different countries, and we then combined the results of these different studies.

Christine Garrington  3:20  

And can you talk us through a little more exactly what you what you did with that information?

Ayten Bilgin  3:24

Yeah, so to assess the level of social relationships we looked at having a romantic partner, having sexual intercourse, and becoming a parent and we were also interested in assessing the quality of the relationship with romantic partners and friends. And overall their information for up to 4.4 million participants in the study, and we overall compared the scores of adults born preterm on these outcomes to those born at term.

Christine Garrington  3:58  

And Marina now I wonder if you can just talk us through them some of your, your principal findings.

Marina Mendonça 4:02

So previous research on the social lives of adults born preterm was quite inconsistent. And as Ayten mentioned in the study we brought together data from these previous studies, which allowed us to have a greater understanding about the effect of preterm birth on social relationships later in adulthood. And what we found was that those who are born preterm were less likely to form romantic partnerships, have initiated their sexual life, and to experience parenthood than those born full term. The point of these associations was in general small for romantic partnership and for parenthood. For example, those born preterm, were about 20%, less likely to form romantic partnerships and 22% less likely to become parents when compared with full time terms. However, the association was stronger for sexual intercourse, because we found that adults one preterms were about 2.3 times - which is more or less 57% less likely to ever had had sexual intercourse. We also found that these associations became stronger the more premature one was born. So this means that those who were born extremely preterm so this is less than 28 weeks of gestation, were at the highest risk of not finding a romantic partner, having sexual relations and having children.

Christine Garrington  5:43 

And was the picture different for men and women? And I wonder also whether age mattered at all? 

Marina Mendonça  5:48

Well, these associations were similar for both men and women so this means that both men and women born preterm are less likely to experience these social milestones, and one of our most surprising findings was that this pattern of associations also did not differ between the younger age group of those between 18 and 25 years, and the older age group of those with more than 25 years. So previous studies have suggested that people born preterm would take longer to make these social transitions, but then catch up. However, our findings suggest that rather than a delay. There was a persistent difficulty in making these social transitions, which could be associated with negative outcomes later in life, such as being more socially isolated, and also having poor physical and mental health, which Ayten also already mentioned that these social relationships are very important for your wellbeing.

Christine Garrington  6:56  

Absolutely, that's really interesting. Now Marina you also looked at the quality of the relationships that people were in, was there anything that was interesting that emerged there?

Marina Mendonça  7:06

Yes, so we found that despite having fewer close relationships. What we found in this meta-analysis was that when preterm adults have friends, or had a romantic partner, the quality of these relationships, was at least as good in preterms, compared to those born full term. So this is a very positive message, and it also highlights the importance of further research on this area as we still know very little about the characteristics of these social relationship.

Christine Garrington  7:42

Ayten, what would you say are the implications of all this? Are there any lessons for how we can better and best support these, these groups as they become adults?

Ayten Bilgin  7:53

Yes, our findings suggest that preterm born individuals could struggle more later on in their lives, regarding their social relationships, they may be more lonely - socially isolated while also facing economical difficulties, and could be a challenge for them later on as adults. When preterm get older their parents may not be around anymore to give them support, and overall, the most important lesson is to intervene and start promoting their social skills, as soon as possible. As specifically when they go in school because these social relationship problems tend to develop early, and those caring for preterm children. This includes parents., health professionals and teachers, they should be more aware of the important role of social development and social integration for preterm children and supporting them to make new friends, that will help them later in life, and help them to enhance their wellbeing.

Christine Garrington  9:02  

Some really clear messages there, now how will this work, feed into the wider Premlife project which is obviously seeking to ensure that preterm and low weight babies do go on and thrive and do have those fulfilling lives.

Ayten Bilgin  9:16

This study is about inequalities in social relationships caused by preterm birth and our previous study from the same project was about economic inequalities, caused by preterm births, both of which are in line with the focus of PremLife. PremLife project investigates which factors provides protection, and increased resilience for preterm children's life course outcomes to help them achieve better outcomes. Findings of this study feeds into PremLife project by highlighting the importance of focusing on the social relationships in childhood so it also does, and investigation of the factors which could explain the difference in social skills in preterm individuals.

Christine Garrington  10:06  

Ayten Bilgin and Marina Mendonça from the PremLife project, were talking to Chris Garrington, for this episode of the DIAL podcast. Association of Preterm Birth and Low Birth Weight With Romantic Partnership, Sexual Intercourse, and Parenthood in Adulthood: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis is research published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. You can find out more about the DIAL research programme at dynamicsofinequality.org. And don't forget to subscribe to the DIAL podcast, to access earlier and forthcoming episodes.

Listed in: Education

First 12 months with mum: will you be happier later on?

Transcript

In Episode 3 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Katharina Heisig and Larissa Zierow from DIAL’s IMCHILD project discuss their research looking at the impacts of parental leave reform in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). They discuss the happiness outcomes of adults who, as children, as the result of the policy reforms, spent 12 months at home with their mother rather than in State run childcare. 

The baby year parental leave reform in the GDR and its impact on children’s long-term life satisfaction is a DIAL Working Paper by Katharina Heisig and Larissa Zierow from DIAL’s IMCHILD project. 

Christine Garrington  0:00

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In this series we are discussing emerging findings from DIAL research. Our guests today are Larissa Zierow and Katharina Heisig from the IMCHILD project which is looking at the impact of childhood circumstances, on how children get on in life. They've been investigating the effects of parental leave policy reforms to see whether children who get to spend the first 12 months at home with their mother, are happier, later on in life. I started by asking Larissa, why they chose the former German Democratic Republic, as the setting for their research?

Larissa Zierow 0:36

You wonder why we choose a reform of a country that is not existing anymore but we thought it's straightforward to look at the GDR’s reform, using this context we did not face two problems, which other research on parental leave, reform, usually face. The first thing is that in other countries, which other studies are using for evaluating the reforms, they usually not all women go to the labour market and not all women go to work. If you want to measure causal effects of parental leave reform this is not so good because it's just a selective group of women who will be targeted by the reform, and in the GDR. It was the case that every woman was kind of in the same boat, because they all went to work. Mothers also, and also mothers mostly work full time. And this just leaves us with a better setting to measure causal effects of the parental leave reform.

Katharina Heisig 1:41

Actually there is a second technical problem. Other studies have, which is, in our opinion even more severe, children from very different families are systematically cared for in different types of childcare you know? This means that worse off children are typically cared for in low quality care for example and better off children are rather cared for in high quality care. There are also severe differences between public and private forms of childcare, as well as that there are a lot of difference between formal and informal types of childcare. The effect, the authors of previous studies measured, these effects depend traditionally on the fact, which kind of child goes to, which kind of childcare, and that's also a big problem, you know, if you want to measure a causal effect. In the GDR there was just one type of childcare, actually, that was standardised, it was state provided, childcare centres that were supervised by the health ministry, and basically all childcare centres were almost the same. Be it the curriculum and levels of teacher education or the group sizes for example, right.

Christine Garrington 2:50

And what about the parental leave policy reform itself, can you just explain that to us.

Katharina Heisig 2:55

This law, we use as a setting, it became effective with the first of May in 1986. Before this reform, mothers with just one child, they received five months of paid maternal leave only. Only mothers with at least two children warranted 12 months of paid parental leave. And this was the case since 1976, with the first of May 1986 all mothers receive between 60 and 80% of their wage, while they were on leave. Yeah, with the help of the setting we look actually at the question whether there is an effect of extending parental leave from five to 12 months.

Christine Garrington 3:32

So what specifically was it that you wanted to look at when it came to this policy reform and its potential benefits.

Katharina Heisig 3:38

So, in general, we were interested in the benefits of parental leave on a child's development. Of course, there are already plenty of other research papers on the topic, but all the papers have these problems going on we already mentioned, We decided to look at overall life satisfaction, which, in a sense comprises all the outcomes other papers use such as education, health, and individual behaviour, for example.

Christine Garrington 4:06

And Larissa where did you get your information from and why was it such a good resource for looking at this particular group of people in this particular way on this particular topic?

Larissa Zierow 4:16

Yeah we used the German Social Economic Panel as a data source it's a representative sample of all people living in Germany. We discovered that it would be perfect for our study, because of many reasons. First of all we have to know whether individuals actually were born in the GDR, and so we got this information on about 1,100 individuals. We also needed of course the information on whether they had siblings because the reform was different for firstborn or later born children of families, and this information was also included in the panel data. We also wanted to have life satisfaction, as a outcome variable, this is also included in this data set, we also use some other data sources to check whether mothers, actually use the parental leave, that was granted them by the reform and we found out that 95% of all mothers, actually use that. So that was also important additional information.

Christine Garrington 5:25

So when you looked at the happiness of those children who did get to spend those first 12 months at home with mom, those first 12 months. What did you find?

Larissa Zierow 5:33

Yeah, we find that children who are now adults, they show an increase in their life satisfaction, as a consequence of the reform. And we thought that this is very interesting, since if you think about it only individuals who are satisfied with their life are usually more positive, they're successful regarding all different things. This is something which is a good thing for every country, and increasing the well-being of individuals, it's mainly one of the most important goals of a welfare state also.

Christine Garrington 6:12

Indeed, and how did that compare then with the people who had spent just five months with their mom or in childcare?

Larissa Zierow 5:33

The increase is eight percent higher score in life satisfaction compared to individuals who just spent the first five months with their mom. Yeah, this is pretty high. If you compare to other studies on life satisfaction. This 8% increase.

Christine Garrington 6:36

And now you delved a little deeper to see whether some of the some of that greater happiness was actually down to developing personalities or people changing as they as they get older, what did you find there Katharina?

Katharina Heisig 6:48

Yeah, we were really interested in that question actually, whether the increase in life satisfaction was driven by, you know, for example, more open, or more positive people. There is this so called attachment theory of Bowlby, John Bowlby who suggests that spending the first year of life with your primary caregivers of mother and/or father is very important for developing trust in detachment, for example, which then affects the personality. There are these personality traits, called the Big Five. This is agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism and openness to new things, and which we analysed in this follow ups. And yeah, when we start to suggest that, especially children from worse off families, but also boys actually benefit in the long run from this parental leave reform. In terms of those big five personality development.

Christine Garrington 7:47

Okay, so we might also assume I guess that better off children might have better health, as they grow up and I wonder if that was a factor?

Katharina Heisig 7:56

Yeah, correct. This was actually a factor. This is, yeah exactly what we find. And what we found in terms of overall health of the observed persons from better off families. And we do not find such positive health effects for children from worse off families. Yeah we explain this difference by the good healthcare situation in the East, GDR’s childcare facilities, which we thought might have been better for the children from worse off families. But the situation was not as good as to compensate for the good situation better off children had at home with their families. And yeah what we also find is that boys do more in terms of health to this parental leave perform.

Christine Garrington 8:45

So, taking everything into account. What would you say are the key points to emerge Larissa?

Larissa Zierow 8:51

Yeah, I think the most important point would be that we can say with our study that granting paid parental leave in the whole first year of the child has really long-lasting positive effects and all children would benefit from that. And we find this, especially for the outcome of life satisfaction when we look at different subgroups of children we can also say that boys benefit in terms of their health and personality development from this whole year of parental leave. It could be that it's more important for boys to be close with their moms in the first year than it is for girls, it could also well be that families, treat girls and boys differently, but we don't know this from our study, this is just speculation. We also see that children from better off families benefit in terms of their health and children from worse off families benefit in terms of their personality development. So we see that there are different effects of the reform by subgroup but in general, our finding is that it's beneficial for for all, all families and for all children.

Christine Garrington 10:04

Yeah, that's really interesting and you, as you've said looked at this in a very clear, very clear policy context. So are there lessons for policy makers in Germany and beyond, would you say Katharina?

Katharina Heisig 10:15

Yeah, definitely. We think so. Well in Germany we actually already have more than one year of paid parental leave so far, like for Germany. We think it would be definitely of big interest to grant also father's paid parental leave for the first months after their child is born. Yeah and how this affects the children right. For example, the thirty months came out in Sweden was introduced, for example, it would be interesting to see results of this kind of thirty months, but with a longer period. Where in many other countries, there is either no paid or just unpaid leave at all or just few weeks or months of paid parental leave, or a maternity leave. We think that our results show that offering 12 months of paid leave, so one year, definitely has benefits for children growing up. And we're, you know, With this for your society as well. But we also know that these policies are very cost intensive governments for sure as to decide to have to decide on their own if they want to invest money in paid leave. But since we also really see positive effects for the children which are visible in the long run, we think it's very good use of money.

Christine Garrington 11:32

There is a very clear message there. Now this research is part of a wider project looking at the impact of childhood circumstances on individual outcomes over people's life course what more can we expect from the project.

Larissa Zierow 11:44

Yeah so one project linked to this reform would be to look at the effect of the paid parental leave on mothers in the overall approach that we actually are interested in outcomes over the life course so I am working on two other projects. One is on all the primary school students, and we got investigator reform which introduced all the schools in Germany. And we compare the effects of attending an all-day primary school instead of our half-day primary school children. We find small positive effects of all the all day schools but they, the effects actually differ a lot by subgroup of students and for some subgroups, attending an all day school is not always positive. And then other project, there we look at the role of interim degrees in secondary school, so getting a degree, already after nine or 10 years of school before getting to the to the highest degree of the academic track, and we find that interim degrees, somehow serve as a fallback option, and the milestone and especially students, at the risk of dropping out of school, profit from from such interim degrees and are more motivated by them.

Christine Garrington 13:13

Katharina Heisig and Larissa Zierow from the IMCHILD project we're talking to Chris Garrington for this episode of the DIAL podcast. The baby year parental leave reform in the GDR and its impact on children’s long-term life satisfaction is a DIAL Working Paper available on the website at dynamicsofinequality.org. Don't forget to subscribe to the DIAL podcast, to access earlier and forthcoming episodes. Thanks for listening.

Listed in: Education

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

Listed in: Education

Aiming high and missing the mark?

Transcript

In Episode 2 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Jesper Fels Birkelund from the Lifetrack project talks about his research looking at the educational aspirations and achievements of the children of immigrants in Denmark. He shares findings from the research and outlines their implications for policy in Denmark and more widely in Europe. 

Aiming high and missing the mark? Educational Choice, Dropout Risk, and Achievement in Upper Secondary Education among Children of Immigrants in Denmark is research by Jesper Fels Birkelund, and is published in the European Sociological Review.

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In this series we are discussing emerging findings from some of the projects in our programme. Our guest today is Jesper Fels Birkelund from the Lifetrack project. As part of the project he has been looking at the educational aspirations and achievements of the children of immigrants in Denmark but he starts by outlining what the wider project is all about. 

Jesper Fels Birkelund  0:26  

Lifetrack is a country comparative investigation of how educational institutions influence the formation of social inequality. So the first research aim of the project is to examine the unequal access to secondary education based on socio-economic and ethnic origin, and then we examine how inequalities and access, potentially differ across institutional contexts. So I work as part of the Danish research team, and we collaborate with teams across Europe. So we have teams in Germany, in England, Finland, France and Italy. So we cover six European countries in total. Our second research aim is then to examine how consequential, the choice of secondary education is for later life outcomes, both in the short run, in terms of educational attainment, and in the longer run in terms of labour market outcomes. So this way you can say we attempt to capture the entire process of how socio-economic advantages are passed down through generations, and then we assess the role of educational choice, and educational institutions in this process.

Christine Garrington  1:28  

As you were saying there you're part of the Danish team you've been investigating the situation, in, in Denmark, what can you tell us about what was already known about the educational ambitions and the choices of, of the children of immigrants who, who have come to Denmark?

Jesper Fels Birkelund  1:46 

Yes, well I take my starting point in a quite well-established finding international research, known as immigrant optimism, or the immigrant paradox, and the paradox being that, although children of immigrants performed relatively poorly in school, they have quite high educational aspirations for the future. So what researchers have found in different settings, is that in given levels of school performance, children of immigrants, choose more academically challenging paths than children of native born parents do. So for example, when looking at the transition to secondary education as we do children of immigrants choose academic tracks over general and vocational tracks, and they do so with even relatively low levels of performance. So, over the past 10 or 15 years. This pattern of immigrant optimism has been recorded in in different settings as I said, so we've seen in France and Germany in the UK and in Sweden, and I also show it for Denmark. Unfortunately, this line of research does not really say much about the reasons behind children of immigrants, high aspirations but I just wanted to add that essential explanation in the literature is that immigrants are a positively self-selected subgroup of their home country's population. So you can say that those who chose to leave their home countries, often with the goal of settling in a new country, to achieve some degree of upward socio-economic mobility, and if not for themselves, then for their children, and then they sort of speak past those high aspirations onto to their children.

Christine Garrington  3:09  

Yeah, understood, let's talk about specifically what you did Jesper.

Jesper Fels Birkelund  3:13  

Yes, to estimate how ethnicity influences educational choice, it is important to compare children of different ethnic origins, that are otherwise similar in terms of the socio-economic background on the one hand, and the school performance on the other. So what I do is to control the these two groups of factors to provide an estimate of just how much more likely children of immigrants are to enrol in academic tracks, compared to children of Danish origin, at given levels of socio economic background and performance.

Christine Garrington  3:42

And where did your information come from? Was there a data set that you used for this?

Jesper Fels Birkelund  3:46  

Yes. So I used the Danish administrative registers which are a very nice data source, so they hold very detailed demographic and educational information on pretty much all the citizens born from 1960 and onwards, and for this specific project, I study a younger cohort of children born in 1994, and 95, and I follow them until they're 21 years old, and that includes about 120,000 individuals. 

Christine Garrington  4:12

That's a substantial number of people to be able to look at. So when you looked at the data, which children were most likely to enrol in upper secondary school, and, and take that more challenging path?

Jesper Fels Birkelund  4:24 

When we look at the raw data, we see that actually equally many children of immigrant and Danish origin enrolled in the academic track so just more than 70% of both groups. The rest of them choosing either vocational education, or they can choose to leave the school system. However, as I said, educational choice must be seen in relation to differences in socio-economic background, and academic performance, so when controlling for these disadvantages among children of immigrants, I find that these children are actually about 12 percentage points more likely to choose academic education, compared to children of Danish origin. And what is more I see the children of immigrants are more likely to choose a more challenging curriculum, even within the academic track. So for example, I find that children of immigrants are more likely to choose Advanced Math and Science subjects, and they choose extra advanced subjects that are optional choices, which is of course a further underscoring of their high aspirations.

Christine Garrington  5:19  

That's really interesting so substantially more children of immigrants. Following these paths as you've outlined, and how did this translate though because this is the big question, isn't it, how did this translate into actual academic achievements further down the line?

Jesper Fels Birkelund  5:34  

Yes, so this is where I like to say that my study really contributes with a new perspective. So I argue that it's somewhat limiting, are we looking at educational enrollment, we should also consider the patterns of dropout and completion and final achievement. If we are to see the full picture here. So the actual consequences of high aspirations, both positive and potentially negative, and what I record is that high aspirations do come with a certain price in terms of a high risk of dropout, and lower achievement for children of immigrants. I find that it's because children of immigrants are being very ambitious, and particularly in the lower part of the performance distribution. So if we look specifically at the bottom fifth of the GPA distribution, I see that almost twice as many children of immigrants, than of Danish origin, choose academic education, and it is among these lowest performing students that the risk of dropout and low achievement is particularly high, so when we observe the children of immigrants, at a higher risk of dropout than children of Danish origin, and we do, it is very much because academically weaker students of students of immigrant origin, choose the academic track while children of Danish origin are more wary of doing so. In other words, if children of immigrants, didn't choose as ambitiously, then their average struggle would be lower, and their average achievement higher. On the other hand, then fewer children of immigrants would be getting an academic degree, and that is the trade off that I report in my study.

Christine Garrington  6:55  

Yeah, so it was in fact something of a double-edged sword in the end was it really?

Jesper Fels Birkelund  6:59 

Yes, that is exactly the point that I'm trying to make here so we see that high aspirations among children of immigrants, help them close the educational gap between them and their native peers, and that is an important point to make, then I also see the high aspirations entail of particularly low performing students of immigrant origin, choose to enrol in these educational programmes that turn out to be too challenging for them, and then they end up either dropping out of the programme, or they complete the programme but with quite poor grades, leaving them with fewer options for continuing in in higher education.

Christine Garrington  7:29  

So what would you say them that we learn from all of this and how might policymakers - those working on the ground in education in Denmark - take this into consideration when looking, obviously, to create equal opportunities to thrive for those youngsters who might have something, you know what we might think of as a as a tougher start in life if they've if they've come as, as the children of immigrants potentially to Denmark?

Jesper Fels Birkelund  7:53  

Well what we actually observe in Denmark right now is that policymakers are making it increasingly difficult to enter academic secondary education, if you have low compulsory school grades, so they have introduced recently a GPA threshold for access, and that is of course, one way of going about reducing the number of dropouts. However, as I see it, this policy also limits the educational opportunities, particularly for ethnic minority students, as many of these students have GPAs that are in the area below this threshold. So a different course of action would be to take a look at the educational institutions, and make them better equipped to serve the needs of low performing students. What do we see in the market is that some secondary schools already screened new students for the reading and math abilities, and then they provide additional support for the students, they find to be struggling, and that may be one way of helping students that have high aspirations, or who may lack the resources to realise them.

Christine Garrington  8:47 

So as we said at the beginning of our discussion this piece of research is part of a wider project looking at whether and if so how different educational systems in Europe might influence or reinforce social inequalities over the life course. Are you able to say then if this is being seen elsewhere I think you sort of hinted that this that it is at the beginning, and if so, are there important learning points for other countries as well as Denmark, would you say obviously each country has a potentially different types of system.

Jesper Fels Birkelund  9:15  

Well, in general I think the points that I just made applies to many European contexts. So if we look all over Europe, we see that an increasingly large proportion of youth cohorts, grew up and had immigrant origin. In the cohort that I study in Denmark 7% are children of immigrants, but in the cohorts that are being born now, it's now more than twice as many, and of course as this minority group gets bigger, it becomes an increasingly pressing question whether children of immigrants are making the right educational choices in the first place for themselves, but also whether schools are equipped to serve this group of students who obviously have high aspirations but may struggle to realise them.

Christine Garrington  9:51  

Aiming high and missing the mark? Educational Choice, Dropout Risk, and Achievement in Upper Secondary Education among Children of Immigrants in Denmark is research published in the European Sociological Review by Jesper Fels Birkelund from the University of Copenhagen. You can find out more about the Life Track project at lifetrack.eu. A details of DIAL's wider research programme at dynamics dynamicsofinequality.org. 

Listed in: Education

The UK LGBT Action Plan: a look behind the celebratory rhetoric

Listed in: Education

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

Listed in: Education

Alessandro Di Nallo: Job loss and divorce: worse for disadvantaged couples?

Transcript

Alessandro Di Nallo: Job loss and divorce: worse for disadvantaged couples?

In Episode 12 of the DIAL Podcast, Alessandro Di Nallo from the University of Lausanne talks about his research looking at the links between job loss and divorce for couples to see if the likelihood of separating is greater for more or less advantaged couples.

The heterogeneous effect of job loss on union dissolution. Panel evidence from Germany, Switzerland and the UK is research presented at the DIAL Mid Term Conference in June 2019.

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In today’s episode we’re talking about the lengths between job loss and divorce, and whether the risk of separation is greater for less advantaged couples. Our guest is Alessandro Di Nallo from the University of Lausanne who started by explaining some of the context of his research.

Alessandro Di Nallo  0:21  

Job loss and unemployment in general is a stressful event. It triggers a reaction within the couple that eventually increase the level of stress, decrease the perception of attractiveness with the partner, and ultimately also reduce the wellbeing of partners. The alternative channels through which, unemployment can also be dangerous for a couple’s stability could be the self-perception of attractiveness. As the partner who loses his job or her job is considered to be less attractive than he was supposed to be before losing his job. So this decreasing in attractiveness may ultimately lead to the couple to separate, to split up.

Christine Garrington  1:06  

What do you want to look at specifically? And why in your research in this area?

Alessandro Di Nallo  1:12  

We want to look at the different effect of unemployment of the male partner and the female partner, they're rarely treated in the literature. And we also wanted to see whether the ethical unemployment changes according to the level of partnership income so does it affect more comfortable advantaged couple or disadvantaged couple.

Christine Garrington  1:39  

You used two long running studies which track the lives of people in Germany and in the UK over many years, tell us a bit about the data you use, how you could use it to look at this question of whether being out of work increases the risk of separation?

Alessandro Di Nallo  1:53

Yeah, so we collected data from two long running studies. The GSOEP, the German survey that's been running since the early 1980s, and to produce surveys. BHPS Understanding Society, that has been running since 1991 combined. We focussed on heterosexual couples in their working age, and that have been in the survey for at least two years. This is important. And then we ended up with even more than 40,000 couples for each survey. Then we separated the couples into two groups, the couples who have experienced a spell of unemployment of at least two months, and those who never did. So the first group is called the treated group, and the second one is the control group. And then we run our sort of quasi experimental methods that is called difference in difference, trying to assess whether the separation rates of the treatment group after experiencing unemployment, were systematically lower, or below the level of the control group. We use an additional method that is called causing and site matching that allows us to pair treated capitals with the comparable couples in the control group according to characteristics such as age, age differences between the partners, education, social class and other characteristics.

Christine Garrington  3:14  

Let’s turn them to some of your findings. Can you talk first about what you found for men and women in the UK?

Alessandro Di Nallo  3:20  

So in the UK we found that couples from which men, experienced unemployment, were more likely to separate by how much. Let's see around 1.5 percentage point more than control factor couples. So for instance, if the average predicted probability for separation control factor couple is about, slightly above 2 percent, 1.5 more means 3.5 percent. This risk increases to an extra three percentage point one year after the couple experience males’ unemployment. Well we didn’t find significant effect when it comes to female unemployment. Men’s unemployment is probably more dangerous for a couple of abilities that men take home a larger share of family income.

Christine Garrington  4:08  

And what about for Germany?

Alessandro Di Nallo  4:10

We find more consistent results in Germany. We found extra risk of separation for both couples in which men and women experience unemployment and the extra risk, extra probability of separation ranged between two and three percentage points more with respect to the control factor couples.

Christine Garrington  4:28  

Out of all of those facts and figures what are the key ones to take away would you say? Sort of what do we learn?

Alessandro Di Nallo  4:34  

So we learned that men’s unemployment is definitely dangerous for couple’s stability. And that this extra risk of separation is about 5%, 4-5% on a yearly basis. In, on the first year of unemployment and for a four-year window after unemployment.

Christine Garrington  4:53  

One of the things you took into account is how much people earned. Did that matter? Was that, was that relevant?

Alessandro Di Nallo  4:58  

Low income families are more prone to separation, probably because they don't have enough resources, financially in the first place to absorb the stress, and to deal with costs due to separation.

Christine Garrington  5:12

And in terms of what we learn from your research about how unemployment can impact on relationships then what would you say?

Alessandro Di Nallo  5:20

There are reasons for which couples should remain together. Another reason that pull couples apart. So we're not saying that there are the only reasons that pull couples apart. Some mechanisms incentivise couples to stay together such as facing legal fees, increasing childcare costs, housing costs, all these kinds of things probably incentivise the couples to be together. But probably the challenge through which stress increases partnership instability is the prevailing one. We're able to say that among the two channels stress is the overwhelming part.

Christine Garrington  5:56  

Okay so stress is really key. Now policy makers in both of these countries, and indeed elsewhere, are very keen to keep couples and families together for all sorts of reasons. What can they take away from your findings and from your research would you say?

Alessandro Di Nallo  6:09  

So, we also find that less advantaged couples tend to split up when they are hit by unemployment, and they are significantly more so. So, it means that they are particularly exposed to increasing risk, deriving from separation - as I told you direct costs, childcaring and so on. Which impact on a larger fraction of household income for the low income family. So these are hidden costs of separation which taxation reform might relieve at least in part. There's also some research, highlighting the fact that couples that are more prone to separation have probably characteristics that lead them to be more prone to job loss. I'm talking about undesirable individual traits, such as personality disorders, anti-social tendencies, mental health problems. So this triggers a problem of self-selection of these couples into both unemployment and instability. And that's why we're looking for alternative methods that approach a causal link between unemployment, and separation. 

Christine Garrington  7:15  

So where did your research go from here?

Alessandro Di Nallo  7:17  

we'd like to analyse alternatives, an additional country would probably include Switzerland in our analysis, and then we'd like to explore more the reason why man’s unemployment is so more consequential for couples’ stability or instability in the UK, other than in Germany, and probably we're looking at how the division of resources and the participation to income pooling within the family is organised in the two countries. 

Christine Garrington  7:46 

The heterogeneous effect of job loss on union dissolution. Panel evidence from Germany and the UK is research presented at the DIAL mid term conference in June 2019. You can find out more about the NORFACE funded DIAL projects at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Listed in: Education

Dilnoza Muslimova: Birth rank - does it make a difference?

Transcript

In Episode 11 of the DIAL Podcast, Dilnoza Muslimova from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam talks about birth rank, genes and how well children get on in life and whether and how parental investment matters.

Birth rank, genes and later life outcomes was presented at the DIAL Mid Term Conference in June 2019 and is part of the NORFACE-funded project Gene-Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities. 

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In today’s episode we’re talking about birth rank, genes and how well children get on in life. And whether and how parental investment matters. Our guest is Dilnoza Muslimova from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, who is also a member of the DIAL research project Gene-Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities. She started by explaining the background to her research.

Dilnoza Muslimova 0:28

We're very interested in how parental time investments interplay with the genetic endowment of children and how those parental time investments can overcome the genetic disadvantages that children have. So in that respect birth rank speaks a lot about the family environment. And yeah, it can be whether you have your older siblings, it can be whether I don't know how much time your parents spent with you, or like, generally, what is the attention that you're receiving, and we were taught that by the literature that talks a lot about parental time investment and the birth rank, couple of studies, they find that for example, children who are born later to the family.  They receive on average about 20 to 30 minutes less of parental time being at the same age as their older siblings. And we thought that it's quite interesting to explore another study also finds this, that gap, siblings have in education and IQ, from the older sibling to the later sibling is almost half of this gap explained by parental time investments. 

Christine Garrington  1:36

Everybody's interested in this whole sort of nature nurture debate I think but it's really challenging to get information about or data about people's genetics, and the life they lead. Where do you get your information from for this particular study that you're doing?

Dilnoza Muslimova 1:52

We were quite lucky that we got funding and were obtaining access to several biobanks and biobank is basically the data storage of all the genetic information, and also biomarkers. Biomarkers are blood measures, and saliva measures, urine samples and so on. I have actually visited one myself in the Netherlands. It was very interesting to observe how they store it as biological samples for individuals at minus 80 degrees Celsius in the freezers, and some freezers are actually quite advanced enough to make it it's quite exciting to see how people are very invested and want to obtain very much like evidence based research and have precise measures of your health and your genetic information.

Christine Garrington  2:42

And we’re talking about lots of people right? Lots of people.

Dilnoza Muslimova 2:44

Yeah, for the UK biobank that we're using in our study it’s 500,000 people and it's amazing because the larger the sample, the more precise, or more representative our results are. So yeah we're quite lucky and another advantage of this biobank, is that they also survey people. In the same data set, you can find their health and genetic information but also their life outcomes; their income, their educational attainment and this allows a lot of prospects for research.

Christine Garrington  3:15

Like you say an incredible resource, incredible. So what aspects of participants’ genetic makeup, did you look at specifically? You have said some of the things that are available in the, in the biobank, what sorts of things do you look at and what were you able to tell from those?

Dilnoza Muslimova 3:31

When we talk about genetic endowments, it's a bit tricky because it's not like the whole genetic endowment that we look at. The saliva is collected from an individual, and then the genetic material in saliva is genotype, basically, your gene is coded 99% of the code is very similar to other people. It's what makes us human. Like what gives us two legs, two arms and so on. And one percent is different, and it makes us more individual. We look at this 1% variation between individuals and their genome wide association studies, which try to analyse how this variation predicts life outcomes for example, education, IQ. There are very particular things like, I don't know preference for tea. Yeah but we tried to focus on more established robust variants such as education and IQ, and the recent studies established that the variation explained by genes is almost the same as variation explained by income in education. So, it's about 10 or 12% of variation in your outcome. We look at that specific aspect of the genetic information of an individual. 

Christine Garrington  4:45

So in simple terms, then what were you able to establish about birth ranks? So where brothers and sisters come in terms of order that they're born, and what that meant for someone's IQ level and educational attainment later on? Which is what you were keen to try to establish.

Dilnoza Muslimova 5:02

So aside of adding genetic information we established, we managed to replicate the earlier studies that show birth rank is negatively correlated with individuals’ IQ and individuals’ educational attainment, which is like the later you're born, that lowers your education or IQ. But interestingly, there is no association between your genetic potential and birth rank. It means that a lot of variation, like a lot of causes are more environmental than genetic 

Christine Garrington  5:37

So it's more to do with what happens after you are born in the family environment?

Dilnoza Muslimova 5:42

Exactly, yep because there is no difference in the potential between the siblings at conception. So that's very interesting.

Christine Garrington  5:49

Yeah that's a really important message isn't it? And so tell us about some of the other key things that you've found so far?

Dilnoza Muslimova 5:55

Well the other finding that we find is basically that children who are disadvantaged genetically. So they have lower than average polygenic risk score recorded for education, or IQ, they're more hampered by being born later. So, in other words, this finding translates into if we bridge it with parental time investments that it might be quite difficult for children with lower genetic endowment for education to catch up with their siblings, if they have lower parental investment. Basically what advantages about genes and birth they are both random within families. So, your genetic endowment is fixed at conception and it is randomly assigned based on your parental genes and your birth rank is also randomly assigned at your birth so you don't choose your preference. It is not chosen by someone, it's just a random. So when you look at the interaction of the birth rank and your genetic endowment .This is what we find that people who are weaker genetically, or who have lower genetic potential, if they were born later than they have even lower educational attainment or IQ, later in life. 

Christine Garrington  7:04

Now, it is important to be clear about what these findings don't imply as much as what they do. So tell us first about how we should interpret them.

Dilnoza Muslimova 7:13

I think it's very important to make clear that we do not mean that people who are born later are genetically disadvantaged. So it is very clear and this is one of the findings that we empirically confirm that they are not an genetically disadvantaged. Another thing that is also very important to make clear is that we do not mean genetic or environmental determinism - genes do not determine your whole life course. And at the same time environment does not determine all your lifecourse. It's very complex interplay between the two. So you cannot, I think we do not propagate labelling people based on their genes or based on their family environment created.

Christine Garrington  7:57

Now its early days, I think that is another thing you are keen to stress, early days in the research, but what would you say that we've learned so far? Because it seems that you have found a lot already. And why is it important we really get to grips with it and understand it? Especially in this context of inequality and wanting to close the gaps between, you know those people who might struggle in life and those people advantaged in some way. 

Dilnoza Muslimova 8:22

I think what we learn from the study, is a lot of previous literature, talk about children’s endowments and how they interplay with the environment. But very few papers actually measured the endowments, and some of the measurements are mostly like birth weight. And birth weight is affected by prenatal parental investment so you don't know what is causing what. And the advantage of our study is that both measures that we use are independent of each other and his allows us to measure the contribution of each aspect of nature and nurture. So that's very interesting and very important. Yeah, and basically I underlined again what we found is that genetical disadvantage children are hampered even more great by fewer parental investments when it comes to their life long outcomes.

Christine Garrington  9:13

Birth rank, genes and later life outcomes is research presented at the DIAL midterm conference in June 2019 by Dilnoza Muslimova. You can find out more about the NORFACE funded DIAL projects at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Listed in: Education

Michael Grätz: Siblings and their incomes - the same or different over the life course?

Michael Grätz: Siblings and their incomes – the same or different over the life course?

In Episode 10 of the Dial Podcast, Michael Grätz from the University of Stockholm talks about sibling similarity in income and what that tells us about their life chances later on.  The research, which uses Administrative Data in Sweden and is published as a Working Paper, was also presented at the DIAL mid term conference in June 2019. 

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In today's episode, we're talking about sibling similarity and income over the lifecourse and across generations. Our guest is Michael Grätz from the University of Stockholm he started by explaining by looking at siblings can help us better understand how much their background and circumstances influence how they get on later in life. 

Michael Grätz 0:25

So what we are interested in estimating how much the family and community background of an individual influences his and her life chances. And the siblings approach is one way to try to do that. And so siblings share many characteristics; they have the same parents, they live in the same neighbourhood, they often go to the same schools and all these factors are taking into account if we estimate how similar brothers are and how similar sisters are.

Christine Garrington  0:55

So in this piece of research what specifically did you want to look at and why?

Michael Grätz 0:59

So the siblings similarities approach many others have used before us. The new thing is what we are doing is we are taking a lifecourse perspective. So what we are mainly interested is whether siblings similarities varies over the lifecourse. So on the one hand there is this idea that genetic effects become stronger over the lifecourse, there is also what Christopher Chang has called luck, so there are random life events happening and they might happen more the older people become. So from that perspective you would expect that siblings become less similar to each other over the lifecourse. But there is also this idea in Sociology that there is a process of cumulative advantage. And from that perspective you would think that siblings are becoming more similar the longer they are in the labour market.

Christine Garrington  1:47

And where did you get your information from?

Michael Grätz 1:49

So what we are using here are papers and administrative data from Sweden. So this is tax data, actually tax records and statistics, Sweden has collected them and made them available for researchers dating back to 1968. And for that reason we can for the oldest cohort in our study - for those born in 1950s we can actually cover their income between age 18 and 60 meaning we have income information on them, on their earnings and on their income, age of 18 to age 60 every single year.

Christine Garrington  2:22

And what else about this data is good? Obviously it has got the sort of information you want but presumably its huge as well right? It covers everybody? Is that right?

Michael Grätz 2:29

Well it covers the Swedish population so it is covering everyone who reported their earnings and their income who reported their earnings and income to the tax authorities in that specific year. 

Christine Garrington  2:39

So in that sense it is a really good source of data for you? So what was the overall picture when you compared the incomes of siblings over their lives first and foremost?

Michael Grätz 2:48

So what stands out is that sibling correlations are definitely highest when they are youngest. So age 20, and 25 when you test the effect that siblings often take the same educational pathways. So meaning if they both go to university. They have low income at the beginning. If they take up some vocational education or they start work and they are lucky they have a higher income at the beginning but then of course they don’t have the income development that people have to go to university. If you look at the further lifecourse then it really depends on how we measure the information. So if you look at income at a specific age we find a decrease over the lifecourse. Meaning that siblings become more different. They become more different to each other. But if we are accumulating income meaning we are adding up the income made from one year to another, we actually find that siblings are becoming more similar in their correlated income to each other. This is not very strong but this is what we slightly find so there is a kind of U shape pattern meaning that their overall income at the end of life shows actually siblings are more similar than what was previously also thought in the literature.

Christine Garrington  3:57

And did it matter whether those siblings were brothers or sisters?

Michael Grätz 4:00

So it does matter for the level in the sense that the effect of family background on income was lower for women than for men. This is what other studies have also found. That is what we find here. Meaning we find lower statistical correlations and higher product correlations but the development over the lifecourse is the same for women and for men. 

Christine Garrington  4:22

And what about if you came from a poorer background or a richer background? Did that matter in some way?

Michael Grätz 4:26

So this is an interesting question because that there is good reason to suspect it should matter. So we are referring to the work by Bolton Connolly from Princeton University who had this idea that families who have a lot or resources are investing that in a way to make their siblings more similar and that we should also find that families from advantaged backgrounds should have more similar siblings. So there should be these differences and he actually also found these differences in one study in the United States. So this is what motivated us trying to replicate his results but we did not find evidence for this. So this is not the case. Even though there are good reasons to expect, it doesn’t affect whether siblings are, the level of sibling similarity depending on from which background they are from. 

Christine Garrington  5:18

Can I ask what you make of that? Out of interest? Why the difference? Any thoughts?

Michael Grätz 5:24

Yeah so maybe parental investments are not that important after all. So either, or parents don’t, if they are compensating in the way we presume they are not compensating enough. It at least not make the income of their siblings more similar. Or they maybe compensating with wealth transfers, so direct transfers. Which is not something which we are not observing in this study.  

Christine Garrington  5:51

Now you looked across three different cohorts born in the 50s, 60s and 70s how did the picture differ between those cohorts?

Michael Grätz 5:58

Okay to be honest that is not the very long historical perspective just having three cohorts so from them we find stability which is also what other studies have found before us. But from when we do find a change, and the change goes in the way that sisters become more similar because the three cohorts so the family background impact increases. And what this means at least that the kind of increasing female integration into the labour market and increasing gender equality is associated with a stronger effect of family background, meaning that it has mainly advantaged women who profit at least first from this increasing gender equality. 

Christine Garrington  6:41

And what have you learned about sibling incomes that we didn’t know before then? And what are the important takeaways would you say from this?

Michael Grätz 6:49

What we are claiming that our study shows is that it is really important to take this lifecourse perspective. And the main takeaway from this whole field of stratification research is the message that it is important to take a long, as long information lifecourse as possible. And it is important to accumulate income over, over many years. So the overall level of sibling similarity that we find for both brothers and sisters is much higher if we are looking at the whole lifecourse aged 18 to 60. And add up all this information than if we just look at five years of the lifecourse, or 10 years of the lifecourse, which is what most previous research has done. And we think that this is, this is of course speculation now but this insight is due not only for our study but the whole inequality that it is very important to take this lifecourse perspective and probably also in other countries than Sweden.

Christine Garrington  7:50

Sibling Similarity and Income: a Lifecourse Perspective is research presented at the DIAL midterm conference in June 2019 by Michael Grätz. You can find out more about the NORFACE funded DIAL projects at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Listed in: Education

Nirosha Varghese: Sleep tight! Does a baby's sleep matter for how they get on at school later on?

Transcript

Nirosha Varghese: Sleep tight! Does a baby’s sleep matter for how they get on at school later on?

In Episode 9 of the DIAL Podcast, Nirosha Varghese from Bocconi University discusses her research looking at the links between early childhood sleep and how children get on at school later on.

Further information:

Early childhood sleep and later cognitive human capital is Marie Curie funded research analysing the relationship between early sleep problems and later cognitive outcomes in a life course perspective. It was presented at the DIAL Mid-Term Conference in June 2019.

Christine Garrington  0:00 

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In today's episode we're talking about children and sleep and asking if sleep problems in very young children might negatively affect how they get on in reading, writing and maths later on. Our guest is Nirosha Varghese from Bocconi University, who started by explaining the background to her research. 

Nirosha Varghese 0: 26  

So, we know that previous studies show that what happens in early life has consequences for later on. But then all the studies that have looked into it usually looks at factors like parent and ACS income, or like exogenous shocks like the recession or war, or earthquake, but none of these studies has looked at sleep as a shock. So, what we're trying to do here is taking evidence from medical literature, which shows that there are adverse effects of sleep problems on cognition and trying to study it from a life course perspective and moreover, although there are some studies that are done in the US, but it has not been done in a European context, and also not from a life course perspective

Christine Garrington  1:08 

So, tell us a bit about where you got your information from or where you are getting your information from.

Nirosha Varghese 1:14 

So, this information comes from ALSPAC, which is the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. It's also known as the ‘Children of 90s data’, because it's a cohort for children born in the 90s, so they initially selected pregnant women who were supposed to give birth in a period of one year, one to one and a half years, and that's where the data comes from. It's geographically limited to Avon and because of this we have a very rich data set. So, we have information on pre-natal characteristics which is really important. The sample is 14,500 approximately. 

Christine Garrington  1:48

So, a really big useful data set, but what sorts of things were the mothers asked about in ALSPAC that helped you examine these questions about sleep and how children get on as they get older?

Nirosha Varghese 1:59 

So first of all, we have sleep measures and here, they're using sleep subjective sleep measures not objective. So here they asked if the children continuously woke up every few hours during the sleep. So, we use that and we use a very similar measure which is like the children wake up during the night. So this is measured all the way from 18 months, like 1.5 years, until 7.5 years. So we have seven points in time. We also have measures on cognition, including IQ, short term memory, some measures for math and English standardised scores and so on. We also have measures on non-cognition, which is coming from standard difficulties questionnaire on behavioural difficulties, social fears and so on. And most importantly we can control for a lot, a lot of covariates including prenatal characteristics and socioeconomic characteristics. 

Christine Garrington  2:55

So, what have you done with all of this fantastic information?

Nirosha Varghese 2:58 

So first of all, we looked at the relationship between different patterns of childhood exposure to sleep and its effects on cognition. So, already we know that there's a negative effect, but we want to know if the timing of that sleep problem actually makes a difference. So, it could be that a sleep problem at 1.5 years is all that matters and sleep problems at five years doesn't matter. So, if you actually do an intervention at five years, it doesn't make sense. So, this is what we are doing, because we have a longitudinal data, we test for different kinds of models. Once we know which model fits the data better we try to see if there are some scarring effects of sleep. So, this past sleep matters, even when controlling for the current status of sleep problem and we also try to understand some of the mechanisms underlying this relationship. 

Christine Garrington  3:49

Yes, so what’s going on behind the scenes, yes indeed. So from what you've found so far does when a child is experiencing sleep problems as you said, the timing of this, matter, and if so, how does it matter?

Nirosha Varghese 4:01 

So, what we find it that it’s not per se the timing that matters. It is the duration of exposure. So, the longer you're exposed to sleep problems, the larger the effect on cognition. So, what this means is that this is very similar to what Heckman in his work says that the earlier the investment the better, so if you do the intervention when the child is young, because then you can shape the child's skills or problems much more better. Better in terms of cost and in terms of the effects that you want. Since there's a link between infant’s sleep and childhood sleep, it's better to do the intervention earlier on, so that's what we find.

Christine Garrington  4:39

Indeed. Now whether one thing causes another directly is always a bit of a tricky area to claim, but what are you able to say so far would you say?

Nirosha Varghese 4:48

So, we cannot establish causality, but what we can say is that there is a negative effect, negative association and this actually, we see that it's a cumulative effect. We also see that there is a scarring that suggests that early intervention is better.

Christine Garrington  5:03

Tell us a bit more about that scarring effect and first perhaps explain by scarring effect, what do we mean and what did you find when you looked at it?

Nirosha Varghese 5:13

So scarring effect is usually used in unemployment and well-being literature. So, what it says is that even when you control for current employment status, so even if you're employed at the moment, past unemployment can actually have scarring effects on a well-being. So, we adapted it into this literature so what we see is that, even if it's you sleep now, can past sleep problems have an impact on cognition? What we find is that even if you sleep well now or whatever your status of sleep is, past exposure to sleep problems, the duration, higher the duration, worsens the effect on cognition. 

Christine Garrington  5:47

What do we learn from your findings would you say so far and how can the research that you've done help those of us who are key whether it's parents or policymakers, teachers all of those interested in the well-being of children help ensure that they get the best possible start in life because that's what we're aiming for really isn’t it? 

Nirosha Varghese 6:05

So, I think the main takeaway is, when to do the intervention and what we find is exactly resonating with that. So, both the evidence on cumulative sleep problems, and on scarring effects calls for early intervention. So, it could be either in terms of healthy sleep behaviours when you’re young like no screen  time after you go to bed, or going to bed at the right time, sleeping proper amount of time. If children are taught how to do it properly, then this can be like lifelong habits, and there are also sleep clinics, so if infants have problems in sleeping, then it's better to take them to the clinics where they're taught how to sleep better. Also, the fact that behavioural difficulties in childhood is coming from sleep problems, it could be one of the channels. Since these problems also happened in the childhood and these are also malleable, as in you can shape them, this also shows that there is a scope for intervention during mid-childhood, as well as for behavioural difficulties.

Christine Garrington  7:05

So, the simple message is getting there really early with your children, get them into good habits, sleep is really important in the longer term. If you’re struggling get help presumably as well. So where does your research go from here then? 

Nirosha Varghese 7:20

So, the next step is to establish causality. So, causality in terms of the relationship between sleep, accumulative acts of sleep on cognition and also the causality between infants’ sleep to mid-childhood sleep. So once we know that there is a causality between early sleep to late sleep then we know that we probably have to do the intervention earlier on for sure. 

Christine Garrington  7:42

`Early childhood sleep and later cognitive human capital is Marie Curie funded research presented at the DIAL mid-term conference in June 2019 by Nirosha Varghese. You can find out more about the NORFACE funded DIAL projects at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Listed in: Education

Áine Ní Léime: The road to retirement - is it an equal one for people in sedentary and physically demanding jobs?

Transcript

Áine Ní Léime: The road to retirement – is it an equal one for people in sedentary and physically demanding jobs?

In Episode 8 of the DIAL Podcast, Dr Áine Ní Léime from the National University of Ireland talks about her research looking at the work trajectories of people in sedentary and physically demanding jobs and what that means for their health as they approach retirement in a policy context where they are expected to work longer.

Áine is a member of the DIAL programme of research DAISIE project which is using similar methods and approaches to those discussed in this podcast to look at the gendered impacts of policies aimed at extending working life (EWL) in the Czech Republic, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and  the UK.

Christine Garrington  0:00  

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the life course. In today's episode, we're asking about the road to retirement, what influences people to take up a physically demanding or sedentary job, and how that plays out as we reach traditional retirement age. Our guest is Áine Ní Léime from the National University of Ireland. She starts by explaining some of the policy context around people being expected to work for longer and the potential pinch points associated with those policies. 

Áine Ní Léime  0:28  

People are living longer, populations are ageing in several European countries and the response to that, or one response to that, has been by the OECD and the EU, to introduce policies designed to extend working lives. So that’s fine and seems very benign and so on. But when you look at that a bit more closely, especially from a gender perspective, which a group of us researchers, were involved in gender based research, and it seemed to us that changing the lens of working lives was going to have some kind of impact on women in particular, because they already had inequalities in terms of pensions, they tend to have lower pensions – there are pension gaps in every country - so we're interested to see what is the impact of extending working lives on you know, a situation that's already unequal. Another issue that seemed likely, again, we didn't know the beginning of the research was followed by people who were in physically demanding jobs, if they suddenly have to work longer, what's that going to do to them? Another emerging area of research, which only kind of became obvious as the research progressed, is that people tend to be in more precarious jobs at the moment and into the future. So again, what impact is that going to have as they have to lengthen their working lives? 

Christine Garrington  1:57  

On that note, as far as Ireland is concerned, I'm quite interested to know what's the situation there with respect to state pension age and any of the policies that have been brought in there and in recent years that relate to this?

Áine Ní Léime  2:10  

Okay, yeah, because my presentation today was based in Ireland, so state pension age in Ireland was 65 until 2014 when the rules have increased to 66 for both men and women. It is going up to 67, in 2021 and 68, in 2028, which is quite a steep rise, considering that the population age 65 and over is relatively low and Ireland is quite a young country. It's in and around 13% at the moment, where, you have other countries that are up at 18 and 22%, so it seemed quite, in some ways, drastic, almost increase, certainly very steep.

Christine Garrington  2:54  

Yes like you say big changes have been taking place, and in order to look more closely at these issues, what exactly have you been doing?

Áine Ní Léime  3:02  

This project that I've been working on, was designed to look at different groups of people to compare men and women and to look at people in three different occupational types. So the first was physically demanding work, and that is obviously physically demanding work, so healthcare workers who often have to lift patients or clients as opposed to cleaners or janitors in the United States, and people involved in construction or you know, any, any job that is physically, obviously demanding. Another group were teachers, so they could be secondary school or primary school teachers and the third group then were academics whose work is not obviously physically, physically demanding in the same way as say cleaners would be. 

Christine Garrington  3:53  

One of the things you did was to create profiles of these different types of people who went into what sorts of jobs. So what sorts of people went into teaching them what sorts of people went into the more physically demanding jobs that you're talking about in the healthcare sector and what sorts of things influenced them in in those directions?

Áine Ní Léime  4:10 

It was generally people who have left school at an early age, this is in particular to Ireland anyway, and many of them had left school at age 13, 14 and 15. They often came from families who are not well off, and maybe had a large number of children, and they often were the older children in the family. So they left, they specifically said because they had 13 children and we needed the money so they never got an opportunity to finish secondary school or certainly not to go to college. Then the teachers on the other and they were really strongly encouraged by their parents to stay on at school, get an education and get a job, which was just this huge push to do that those were the main differences. 

Christine Garrington  5:01  

When you looked at the health of your participants, what sorts of things cropped up in relation to their sort of working lives once they were into their late 60s?

Áine Ní Léime  5:10 

Even earlier, for many of the care workers, they tended to have, to follow up with, say chronic conditions in their back/with relation to the backs, who had injured their knees or their feet and their hips - those were the main ones. Well, the interesting thing from our perspective was that it was work related. Many of these were caused from their work, whereas some of the teachers, a small number of teachers would have ill health, but it was not work related, it might be cancer or heart disease, something like that. 

Christine Garrington  5:49 

Yes something that wasn’t specifically related to their day-to-day job as it were. Now we tend to think of teaching as one of those professions, it's very much a job for life, whereas being a janitor or cleaner or health worker, as you said, might be slightly more precarious work. I wonder if that was born out in the interviews that you did? Did you get a feel for that?

Áine Ní Léime  6:09  

That is true, although I do think it’s beginning to change. It was very much the case. there are a few differences again, because say the healthcare workers, if they were working for the government, they might have a good contracts/stable contracts, ut if they were working for private healthcare companies, they really had no guarantees about, even their hours for the following week. And one of the things that could happen to them was that their clients might have to go to a nursing homes if their health got worse, or, or they might die, or, you know, but they would be suddenly left without an income, you know, without substantial pieces of income for the following couple of months or whatever. So that had a big effect on their ability to pay consistently into a private pension, which is what the government is now recommending that people do. The government in Ireland it has increased the minimum number of contributions you need to get a state contributory pension, so that definitely it does affect it yes.

Christine Garrington  7:17 

Interesting. And when you asked your participants about what they thought about, sort of the recent changes in policy and having to work longer for example, what sorts of things did they tell you?

Áine Ní Léime  7:28

Some of them were surprised, they didn’t even realise that this was happening, but most in all groups, most of the workers totally disagreed with the extension of working life. Well, they disagreed with it being compulsory, which is what they see it as being, and I suppose in effect it is because if the State Pension age is increased they have no income unless they go on Job Seekers’ Allowance which they think is also impossible to get a job at age 66. Most people's jobs are subject to contract law in Ireland and that ends at 65 at the moment. If State Pension Age increases this gap where people are suddenly left without an income and without a job. So yeah, most people disagreed with this raise of the State Pension Age. They felt it would be okay if it was not compulsory you know, if it was a choice, cecause some people do want to live longer.

Christine Garrington  8:22 

What would you say then are the main points to emerge from the research and what would be the implications for policy to your mind?

Áine Ní Léime  8:30 

Okay, well I suppose the most obvious one, first there is the impact on people in physically demanding jobs and that would be both men and women. The government needs to think of some way of addressing that, so perhaps it could be to have people in physically demanding jobs could retire earlier, and there is a sort of precedent for that with firefighters and you know, the army and the police, the guards or guardi we call them. They do retire early. That doesn’t extend at the moment to people in other more generally sort of physically demanding work. So I think that’s definitely something that needs to be addressed. How exactly they do it I’m not sure, but they could as somebody suggested today, limit it to a certain number of years, rather than linking to age. Thaat might be one approach, because one of the issues that people raised was that they had often started work ate age 13, 14, 15, so they'd already worked for 50 years. So it was very much this perception, ‘I don't want to die at work’, so they wanted a few years of being able to have a pension and just relax a bit.

Christine Garrington  9:50  

Yes that's quite a, quite a striking and strong message, isn't it indeed? So where does your research go from here, you mentioned earlier about the comparisons you are doing with the US, where does all of this work go?

Áine Ní Léime  10:01  

I'm involved in a new project, which is the DAISIE project funded by NORFACE and that involves researchers from five different countries, so there is the Czech Republic, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. We're looking at people in different occupations. One is transport, finance and health, but it is nurses this time. It's an advancement of this research, because it's not only workers that we are interviewing, but also people we call experts, but they’re trade unionists, employers and we’re trying to get this rounded picture of what, you know, everything that affects people when they try to extend their working lives. And also just to get the employers’ perspectives, because we didn’t have that. That was kind of a gap that I noticed, you know, would be nice to know what the employers thought, what kind of measures they had or didn’t have. So that's what we're working on at the moment and that's pretty exciting because we're going to interview 120 people in each country and looking at their entire work life trajectories. I think this is a really important topic because it's, you know, it's going, it's not going to go away, it's becoming more and more important, and I think this case study approach will be very interesting to see what comes out of that. 

Christine Garrington  11:18  

Differentiated outcomes at retirement for workers in physically demanding and sedentary work in Ireland, a life course approach, is research presented at the DIAL midterm conference in June 2019. Áine Ní is part of DIAL’s DAISIE project, which is funded by NORFACE. You can find out more about the DIAL projects at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for literning to this episode of our  dot dynamics crossly.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast which is presented and produced by Chris Carrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Listed in: Education

Rachel Robinson: Optimist or pessimist? Pre-term personalities and later life chances

Rachel Robinson: Optimist or pessimist? Pre-term personalities and later life chances

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00  

Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In today's episode, we're discussing optimism and pessimism in preterm babies, and the implications for their long-term health. Our guest is Rachel Robinson from the University of Helsinki who is part of the DIAL funded project Life Course Dynamics after Preterm Birth -Protective Factors for Social and Educational Transitions, Health and Prosperity.

Rachel Robinson  0:25  

Research does show that the more optimistic a person is and the less pessimistic they are the better health outcomes they have, whether that's physical, psychological and social. We have been looking at this, specifically in relation to preterms. A term pregnancy is from the beginning of the 37th week to the end of the 41st week. And so, the most simple way, preterm birth is anything before the 37th week of gestation, of course there's varying degrees of prematurity, with medical technology we have babies surviving much earlier than we did in the past, and the chances of survival have increased so much. In the 1960s 1000 gram infant, which are predominantly very low birth weight infants or preterm would have had a 95% chance of death, where in by the year 2000 that same 1000 gram infant would have a 5% chance of death. So with our great advances in medical technology over the years, we have children surviving who weren't surviving before, and we are now at a point that those children are reaching adulthood. So we see adult life outcomes, which we could never previously see before.

Christine Garrington  1:43  

Now you looked at people born preterm in the UK and in Finland. Where did your information come from?

Rachel Robinson  1:48  

Our work is part of the Premlife project, and it's a collaboration of several cohorts from around Europe. We use specifically three cohorts, the ALSPAC cohort, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children looking at children born in the 90s from the UK. And then we had two clinical cohorts from Finland, one, which is the Arvo Ylppö longitudinal study where the children were born in the late 80s and then the Helsinki Study of Very Low Birth Weight Children, which were born in the 70s to early 80s. And all of these cohorts had information, starting from the mother's pregnancy, and then extending into early adulthood. So we have quite a few factors and characteristics that we can use to explore.

Christine Garrington  2:36 

Now the great thing about these data sets, they are also very large right? And they have a lot of information.

Rachel Robinson  2:43 

Yeah, yeah, I mean, for instance the ALSPAC study originally followed over 15,000 children, of course we have less in our analysis just because they didn't all have the outcome that we were looking to study, but the issue in many preterm birth studies is that there's such a limited number of preterm children and each birth cohort that you don't have enough statistical power to really differentiate the effects. And so by combining these cohorts, we have the power to actually see those differences and more nuanced differences, especially over the different gestational ages.

Christine Garrington  3:21  

So how did you work out from the information given in those studies, whether people were pessimists or optimists and how optimistic or pessimistic they were compared with their peers? For example.

Rachel Robinson  3:31  

So, all of the studies had participants in early adulthood, so around early 20s, take the life orientation test, which looks at some scale of optimism and pessimism and they self-rate whether questions such as, if something bad will happen to me than it will, or you know I always expect good things to happen to me. Questions sort of along those lines, and then they get a score for those.

Christine Garrington  4:00  

So Rachel what did you find when you looked at the links between being born preterm and how optimistic someone was?

Rachel Robinson  4:05  

So, with optimism, we found great news. Which is that preterm children do not differ in their level of optimism with term born children, which is great and it actually quite aligns well with literature that preterm children rate their quality of life at a similar level as term born children, as well as their life satisfaction, things like that. So, so it makes quite a lot of sense and it's great news that they don't see themselves differently. 

Christine Garrington  4:34 

And what about the pessimism?

Rachel Robinson  4:36  

Pessimism is a bit of a different story. Unfortunately, which is that they do differ in their level of pessimism preterms do have a higher level on their pessimism score, but it's not that simple that it's just preterm makes you more pessimistic. Once we adjusted for other factors, you see that the differences actually go away, and that it's really important to consider maybe other factors that are more concentrated in a preterm population than actually just whether someone is preterm or not.

Christine Garrington  5:11 

And that brings me quite nicely into the next question because, of course, you know, some children born preterm might have something like a brain impairment, for example, that might affect their personality I am guessing. Did this have any bearing at all on your findings? Is that one of those things.

Rachel Robinson  5:26 

Actually neurosensory impairments, do not have any effect on our findings. When we perform certain sensitivity analysis, which neurosensory impairments include cerebral palsy, hearing, vision, and developmental disability. So, for that group, it didn't actually change the results, but there are factors that do change the result. We see, for instance, that there's a significant impact from your gender, for one, females tend to be more pessimistic than males, but then also there is whether your mother smoked during pregnancy or not, as well as your parental education which we use as a proxy for socio economic status in childhood. And also then an adult BMI, all play a role, and it's important to note that three of those things are all modifiable characteristics.

Christine Garrington  6:22

So what does that actually tell you then?

Rachel Robinson  6:24  

It tells us that it's not so much about being preterm, but that more about your level of pessimism is explained by these other factors, and that these other factors for instance maternal smoking is highly predictive of a preterm birth. So you have that much more concentrated in preterm populations, and what it tells us as it affirms literature that smoking has harmful long term effects in pregnancy on the offspring later in life. In regards to the parental education, it tells us that society and government policies which continue to lift up the overall education level of families will improve their societal circumstances and their long term outcomes and also as far as adult BMI goes, continuing to encourage healthy lifestyle behaviours will play a role in people's personalities.

Christine Garrington  7:19  

Are there any other key takeaways that you'd like to mention?

Rachel Robinson  7:21  

I think it's just quite important that one we recognise that the level of optimism is is equal and that in itself is a very good thing because our research group is looking at what are the factors that allow certain preterm children to prosper. Because there is strong evidence that preterm children have worse outcomes in cognitive impairments, and depression, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, academic achievement and physical health factors, higher blood pressure, there's so many factors that we see later in life which are negatively affected, and it's really refreshing to see that there is, in certain ways, no difference. So that's quite good and, but then, many of the factors that we see, explain the difference between preterms and terms are something that are modifiable.

Christine Garrington  8:16  

Yeah, so there are small changes potentially that could make big, long term differences for these for these for these babies. So early work, obviously, showing some really important findings, really interesting findings where things go from here in the project? And what more are you hoping to be able to do?

Rachel Robinson  8:36  

Our project will continue to pursue other outcomes there we'll be looking at how we can find ways to encourage societal government and family policies to really support pre terms now, and in future, and improve their lives and so that's that's the general direction that our work will continue to go and there are many universities and institutions around Europe collaborating to bring their data on preterm birth together and really join forces to find what makes life better. And also I was preterm myself that it has its own level of importance to me and also I think it's a topic that impacts a lot of people because people think that when you're a small child, or the small infant, then you catch up, that they don't suffer as much as far as social, academic, relational, all of these outcomes that we see now being different, as a preterm child I had no idea that I was at higher risk for for these things later in life. So, at least to me, it's fascinating.

Christine Garrington  9:46  

Optimism and Pessimism and Preterm is research presented at the DIAL Conference 2019 by Rachel Robinson. You can find out more about the NORFACE funded DIAL projects at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Listed in: Education

Christian Zünd: Who we are and what we drink - genes, pubs and alcohol policy

Transcript

In Episode 6 of the DIAL podcast, Christian Zünd from the University of Zurich discusses his research looking at the interplay between our genes and what we drink, local availability of alcohol and the role of licensing laws. The research is part of the NORFACE-funded project, Gene-Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities (GEIGHEI), which is looking at how Genes and the Environment (GxE) interact to generate inequalities in education and health over the life course.

Christine Garrington  0:00  

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In today's episode we're discussing genes, pubs and drinks and asking what our genes can tell us about our alcohol consumption? How they interact with our environment? And what all that might mean for public health policy? Our guest is Christian Zünd from the University of Zurich, he's part of the DIAL funded project Gene-Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities.

Christian Zünd  0:28  

Basically there's about 60 different medical conditions that have been strongly associated with alcohol consumption, there's a lot of sort of epidemiological and medical literature that looks at these current links. There's even been a paper that tries to sort of quantify the impact of alcohol consumption, sort of, compared to say smoking or obesity and these kind of things added to inside that it's actually on a global scale sort of comparable to the damage caused by smoking, or by hypertension and these kind of thing so it's quite a major health issue.

Christine Garrington  1:00  

So when it comes to any links that might exist between our genes, which is what we're here to talk about today, and the alcohol we drink, what was it that you wanted to look at specifically and why?

Christian Zünd  1:12  

Part of it is that we're really interested in seeing how different components sort of come together to determine how much you drink, and so part of that is your genetic makeup. So there are certain factors that influence how likely you are to drink, basically by influencing the way your body deals with different kinds of sugars and so that's at least part of the story. And the other part seems to be just a residue of all sorts of behavioural factors that might make you more likely to go to frequent pubs and these kind of things so it's not entirely clear what's going on there but we have some idea. Part of it is a metabolism, breaking down different sugars kind of story and the other policy is not that well understood at the moment, then the other factor is just your local environment so we all know that if you are a student you tend to drink more. So there's this kind of age, lifecycle aspects to it. And there's also the factor, which is basically just how easy it is for you to go to a place and have a beer there. And so what we decided to study is basically looking at how your genetic makeup interacts with your local environment, and we'll look specifically at how many hops are there within one kilometre of the place of your residence, and we also look a bit at supermarkets and these kind of things

Christine Garrington  2:25  

And where did you get your information from?

Christian Zünd  2:28  

Where? Yeah so it's becoming increasingly easy to do this kind of genetic research. And one big factor is the UK has this really amazing data source called the UK Biobank, and it's about half a million individuals, and we do have genetic information for them and a lot of other health related behaviours. So there's a number of questions that deal with how frequently do you drink alcohol? Very specific questions about how much beer do you drink? How much wine you drink? Sparkling wine with these kind of things, so there's quite quite a lot of rich information on health behaviours and we also know where these people live so basically what we were able to do is sort of match this information from the UK Biobank with a large cross section of where all the pubs in the UK are located, and we've we've had over, 10 or so largest supermarket chains, the UK and so we have a pretty good idea of how easy it is for these people to buy alcohol somewhere.

Christine Garrington  3:20 

So, how did you make use of the genetic information that was available then. So what have you done with it, basically, um, what can it tell you what does it tell you about people's drinking habits?

Christian Zünd  3:30  

The approach we use is called a polygenic risk score, and the idea is that instead of trying to identify the one gene that causes you to drink a lot if you just take sort of like bird's eye view of the entire genome and you look at all the different associations and even though each one of them contributes very little to your drinking behaviour, combined, if you look at all of them you can actually tell quite a lot about how much people drink. And so it's this useful approach for all sorts of complex traits where it's not entirely clear which genes are involved in it or whether it is a large combination of them, people have been using it to look at the educational attainment, people have been using it for height and BMI, these kind of things. We use this for alcoholic consumption,

Christine Garrington  4:16  

And so what about how you are able, if you were able to establish the availability of alcohol in an individual's local area? For example, and also how did you sort of find out whether there were any local efforts, if you like - any policies in place to try to restrict the amount of alcohol, the people were consuming? as I mentioned we

Christian Zünd  4:34  

As I mentioned we have information basic data from the internet on the locations of pretty much every single pub in UK, and we do have their coordinates from Google Maps and that allows us to then match them fairly precisely with the place with someone on our lists, and initially what we wanted to do is we wanted to look at like, what's the shortest distance to a pub that you have so how far will you have to walk to get to a pub? But because that measure is only precise to some degree. It turned out that actually a lot of the people in our sample live very close to pub so we didn't really have a lot of variation there so instead we decided to look at how many pubs, do you have within one kilometre? and there we find quite a bit of variation so if you're living in a more rural place, it's actually possibility do not have a single pub within one kilometre, although that tends to be very rare in our data. And if you live in a place like Blackpool, you probably going to have two or 300 pubs or restaurants and these kind of things within one kilometre of your residence, so there's a lot of variation there.

Christine Garrington  5:39  

Okay, so let's start getting into the nitty gritty of what you found so far, appreciate it is probably ongoing, but you have found some things already, just talk us through some of the main things that you found around that.

Christian Zünd  5:52

The first one is not entirely surprising, which is that we're actually able to predict quite a bit of how much people drink. So the people who sort of score lowest on the polygenic risk score they drink about half as much on average as the people who score highest so there's a fairly strong relationship there, the more interesting finding is that if you have a high genetic propensity to drink a lot, you react much less to sort of changes in the environment. So, it seems that if you're not very prone to drink, and you would have to walk quite a bit to get a pub, or there's not that many options, you might just drink whereas if you have a high genetic propensity walking a bit doesn't really seem to deter you. So there's sort of this difference in how much you react to these availabilities in the environment. Then there's a second finding, which is quite interesting, which seems to be that people who have a high genetic risk to drink tend to self-select into places where there's more opportunity to go drinking. And so we tried a number of different approaches and they're basically supplying the same result. So one is just to look at the cross section, then see whether we can predict the number of pubs, based on your polygenic score. And that seems to be the case. The other one looks at people that we can observe at several different points in time. And there it turns out that if you have a high genetic propensity to drink, but you live in a place with few pubs you are more likely to move to a new place, same is true if you have a very low polygenic risk to drink, and you live in a place with a lot of pubs, also more likely to move to new place. And the third thing is that if you compare where someone grew up, and how many pubs there were around that place to where they live now. You do find the people with a high polygenic score, tend to have to move to places have more pubs and people with lower score tend to move to places with fewer pubs. So there seems to be quite a lot of sort of self-selection in the environment there. 

Christine Garrington  7:55  

But what about only sort of the policy from then? Because efforts are made in certain areas, whether it's to stop more drinking outlets or more pubs opening up, or restricting the amount of hours for example that pubs and places where you can buy alcohol, stay open. Where's the link there then with sort of local policies that are in place? What do we learn?

Christian Zünd  8:20  

Alcohol licencing policy tends to be fairly decentralised for UK standards. And so there's quite a bit of variation in how likely these places are to try to restrict drinking. But the interesting thing from our perspective is that they're actually not allowed to make public health considerations in their decision making but only to look at things like public noise and disturbances, the impact that it might have on children, and these kind of things but they're not supposed to try to use this as a public health tool and so in a way we have this variation that's introduced for other reasons that we can try to see how that affects health behaviours, so far is mostly concentrated on the tool called a no sales licence, so there's a lot of different establishments that could apply for licences to sell alcohol so there's not only pubs and restaurants but there's also basically every kind of entertainment area that's open late so that includes sports facilities, it includes theatres and cinemas and batting halls and all these kind of establishments. Some places, tend to hand out no sales licences so even though they're licenced to stay open and provide entertainment and these kind of things they're not allowed to sell alcohol. There's a lot of variation in how likely these local licencing boards are to restrict sales and all of these other places. And what we find there is quite interesting because it's basically just saying that we found, for the different reaction to how easy it is to walk to pubs. So we also find that the people with the highest polygenic risk to drink react to least to these changes, whereas the people with the low polygenic risk, they tend to be the people that actually start to drink less if it's harder for them to go drinking, and then we looked at a number of other tools such as licences that allow you to sell alcohol 24/7, and we would expect to have an effect that goes in the other direction. That seems to be a case so if there's more outlets that are likely to sell alcohol basically all night long. People in this area tend to drink more. And we can see that, sort of, the change is strongest for the people that have the lowest risk score and the people with the highest genetic risk to drink they basically don't change their consumption as much. Which has a number of interesting implications in the sense that if these are the people that we actually want to target, and to have an impact on their behaviour. These tools don't really seem to be effective for that. 

Christine Garrington  10:52  

Yeah, that's brings us nicely to my next question really which is sort of what do we learn about how useful genetic information is in efforts to create and maybe evaluate public health policies?

Christian Zünd  11:02 

The question is obviously that we learn anything more from incorporating this genetic information from what we could get it if we just ask people do they drink a lot or not? And we tried to test this and it's, interestingly enough, you can even if you control for how much people drink, you can still use their genetic information to predict a lot about the risks of developing what, some of these associated diseases so a disease of the liver of the digestive system, these kind of things. Which seems to imply that either there's some other genetic channel, or more likely that the genetic information is actually in a sense a more comprehensive measure of their lifetime alcohol exposure and what you would get if you just ask them how much they drank in the last week or something like this. So there seems to be this, just sort of it being a valuable measure to predict these kind of medical conditions. And the other thing is that it gets at a kind of underlying inequality that is otherwise not observable. If we think about your genetic environment is sort of being inequality that's fixed the conception, where you can differ from your siblings for example for for some reason that sort of completely outside of your control. We can then see whether these policy interventions, mitigate these inequalities and sort of protect you against them or whether they actually lead to stronger inequality in the amount of alcohol that they actually consume. And it turns out that, at least for the policies we looked at they tend to actually increase inequality because the people that we would like to react most tend to be the people who react least these kind of policy interventions. 

Christine Garrington  12:45  

So, just finally, what would you say the takeaway message and then from those really interested in the public health in public health policies and to reduce the burden on overstretched health services, particularly in places like the UK but indeed elsewhere?

Christian Zünd  12:58

It's an open question so it could be done on other other kind of policies are actually able to protect against this sort of genetic inequality. So one thing that we would really like to study but unfortunately can't in the UK, are changes in the age we're allowed to drink. And so if our current data we can’t really look at this but in theory could be that if you've raised the age that people are allowed to drink, you will actually find a policy that mitigates against this inequality instead of sort of increasing it in the end, but that's an open question.

Christine Garrington  13:30  

Genes, pubs and drinks is research presented at the DIAL conference 2019 by Christian Zünd. You can find out more about the NORFACE funded DIAL projects at dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Listed in: Education

Karl Ulrich Mayer: A Lifecourse Observatory - no fantasy!

Listed in: Education

Jo Blanden: How well are youngsters getting on compared with mum and dad?

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00  

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse.  In today's episode, we're discussing intergenerational mobility, and asking how the younger generations fare and compared to their parents when it comes to owning a home and what they earn. Our guest is Dr. Jo Blanden, from the University of Surrey, who is using data from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society to look at these questions and also to see if the picture is different in the UK from elsewhere.

Jo Blanden 0:28

Intergenerational mobility is the relationship between the social and economic status of parents and children. And generally, we think of this in two ways. And most of my research has looked at relative mobility, which kind of thinks of, you know, success as a kind of ladder, and looks at what run your own compared to what run your parents are on and kind of keeps the ladders next to each other. So it's a relative, it's a relative measure. And it's often seen as a measure of the openness of society, and sort of a kind of idea about equality of opportunity. And it's not without its difficulties, but that's something that's commonly been looked at. Alternatively, we can consider absolute mobility. If you look at your parents’ life and your life, you can say, well, I've made progress compared to them. And that says everybody can make progress. It's an absolute measure, not a relative one. 

Christine Garrington  1:16 

What specific aspects of intergenerational mobility have you been looking at and why? 

Jo Blanden 1:22

Economists have often thought about this, and I am an economist, in terms of the economic wellbeing of generations by looking at relative income and earnings mobility. You know, a number of years ago, colleagues, and I looked at relative mobility in the UK, for people born in 1958 and people born in 1970. And what we found there is that there seemed to be a decline in relative mobility. In other words, you're more tied to where your parents were, then in the 1970 cohort that had been the case in the 1958 cohort. And then I think the evidence suggests that things kind of levelled out. So they got worse, there was less intergenerational mobility, and then that's kind of remained fairly static. And we also found around that time that the UK seems to be fairly immobile compared to other developed countries. Now, where the gap is, there's been much less said about intergenerational wealth correlations, or this measure of absolute mobility. And both of these are clearly really important dimensions of how lay people and politicians conceptualise economic mobility. You know, a lot of people will think of mobility in terms of having wealth, because you kind of have this idea of a landed gentry having a lot of wealth and that being inherited across generations. So that is clearly an important aspect of what people think about as wealth. And it's also true that when people think of mobility, they really are comparing themselves to the absolute living standards of their own parents. So that's the absolute dimension that I'm going to consider as well. 

Christine Garrington  2:47

Right. So one main focus of some of your most recent work has been home ownership. And what can looking at who owns a home and who doesn't, within and across generations tell us?

Jo Blanden 2:58

In my work with Steve Machin and Andy Eals we argue about homeownership is an important driver of and proxy for wealth. And we estimate intergenerational correlations in homeownership across different countries and time periods. So we focus on the UK but we look at other countries for comparison. And that kind of makes sense, because housing equity is the largest component of overall wealth in a number of countries. And also inequality in home ownership is one of the important drivers of wealth inequality. So one of the reasons why we're worried about and indeed, we think about the fact that young people are finding it hard to own their own home because of the impact on their that's going to have on their ability to accumulate wealth. You might argue that intergenerational transmissions of wealth is kind of even more important to understand than correlations in income, which we've looked at more, because wealth is so important in people's permanent consumption and their ability to kind of withstand shocks and plan for the future. So it seems really important to build wealth. But sometimes we can't look at wealth directly, because we just don't have very good data on that. So homeownership seems kind of a sensible proxy and that’s the argument we are building. 

Christine Garrington  4:04

Indeed, and on that note, there's been a lot of discussion here in the UK and elsewhere about how hard younger people are finding it to get on the housing ladder. This is something that you wanted to look at, specifically, what exactly did you do? 

Jo Blanden 4:16

There's a couple of things we did. The first thing we did, as you discussed, is to actually lay out the facts of what young people's experience of homeownership has been over time. And we find something really striking there. For the youngest group that we look at under 35-year-olds, there's been a really steep decline in home ownership rates. So in about 19, in 1996 50% of this group owned their own homes, and it's now down to about 30%. And there have been similar smaller declines of people in older groups. Although, interestingly over 65 years and actually increase the rate of owner occupancy. There is a real cohort effect there because that group would have been the ones that were able to take advantage of buying a home say in the 80s where it was a bit more affordable, right to buy etc. So that's one thing that we looked at was to kind of lay out those trends in homeownership among young people. The other thing we do is to look at this relationship between homeownership parents, and homeownership children. And what we find there is there is an important correlation there, so that if your parents own their own home, you're more likely to own your own home. It is a strong affect and it also seems to have gotten worse. So that when we're looking at these falls in owner occupancy, among younger groups, they've been much larger among people who parents didn't own their own homes so there's real inequality there. 

Christine Garrington  5:33

And I'm interested to know where you got your information from Joe.

Jo Blanden 5:36

The Labour Force survey takes regular measures of who are owner occupiers. So we can use that to kind of look at the general trends. But the most important data we have used is what social scientist call longitudinal data, where you can come back and look at people over many years. So we can use the British Household Panel, which asked people every year questions about wealth, and homeownership, etc. But we can also use these British Cohort Studies, which have followed a group of babies all the way from birth, every few years, all the way up to adulthood. In fact, the National cohort, National Child Development Study, people born in 1958, now reached their 60^th year, and I went to their 60^th birthday conference last year, which was really interesting. So those dates are really, really valuable to this kind of study 

Christine Garrington  6:22

How do what you can what you found in the UK compare with the other countries that you looked at? Because indeed, you did look at other countries. 

Jo Blanden 6:32

Yes. And it's really interesting, because the trends that we see in the declining owner occupancy among younger people in the UK, completely dwarfed those seen in the other countries that we look at. So we consider this in Germany, the US, in Australia over the same period. And while we do see slight declines, it's nothing like what we see in the UK. And that's interesting, because in Australia house price changes have been nearly as great as the UK, it's been really big rises in house prices in Australia as well. But nonetheless, the UK has the largest rise in house prices, and the biggest shift against owner occupancy for people. And when we look at this idea of this question across generations, so whether parents and children have a correlation with owner occupancy, we see that we do see this in all the countries that we consider, but it's stronger in the UK than in these other three countries. So young people whose parents own their own home are 25 to 30% more likely to own their own home in Australia, Germany and the US. And it's really consistent across those countries, where in the UK, it's about 40% more likely. When we look at the British Household panel it is really striking. And the next thing you want to do in this research is really think about how we can link this up to this idea that we've got in our heads about the link between this and the intergenerational correlation of wealth. And to also understand how the UK housing market which is quite different from those in other countries might be bringing that these changes as well. So we've got a little bit more work to do. 

Christine Garrington  8:00

Yeah, indeed, it'll be interesting to think about this in the context of Brexit, I'm sure, going forward. Now, the second aspect of your work, you've mentioned already in this area is what you described as absolute mobility or what's referred to as absolute mobility, I wonder if you can just for those people, that might not be quite sure what that is, explain what it is, and why you think it is such an important consideration. 

Jo Blanden 8:22

So we've already kind of touched on this in terms of the owner occupancy thing, you know, if your parents own a home, to be absolutely mobile, you would want to own a home as well. Or if your parents didn't own a home to be absolutely mobile, you would then move on own one. So when we think about this more generally, kind of thinking of the idea of being better off than your parents. And that's what we mean by absolute mobility. So despite this being the first thing that many people think of when they're asked to consider, you know, ideas of intergenerational mobility, we don't know that much about it. Firstly, because historically, it's not been an issue, because earnings growth has always been strong. So you can kind of guarantee that you're going to do better earn more than your parents in absolute terms, when you take it out in the effective prices. So nobody really worried about this very much. It was much more frequently discussed in the sociological literature, because there was this idea of people moving from a working-class background to a white collar jobs. And that was seen as absolute mobility in Sociology, whereas in economics, people didn't really worry about it. Also, and this is kind of similar to the wealth story is a particularly good data, which gives you a really precise measure of income, which is comparable to a really precise measure of income of your parents. So it's actually quite hard to measure. But we've used some methodological tricks to overcome that and actually consider that in the UK. 

Christine Garrington  9:43

On that note, that's going to be my next question. You've been looking at it in the UK, as you said, what have you found? 

Jo Blanden 9:48

So we have had to use some methodological tricks here to think about where you are in your own earnings distribution, the earnings distribution of parents, the earnings distribution of children, and how those two match up. So we actually use a number of different data sources to bring this story together. But that doesn't matter so much. The important thing is that we look at where the young people in their 30s, earned more than their parents did, at a comparable age. And what we find there is that this idea of absolute mobility had been rising. So each generation had a higher possibility of doing better than their parents in the previous one. And that went up to the mid 1970s, about my cohort. But then it's really fallen, it's absolutely tanked. So for kids born in 1975, who were 30, in 2005, half of them out earned their parents at the same age. Okay? But in the decades since, there's been a really steep decline. So now only about a third of children who were born in 1987. In other words, who were 30 in 2007 will match or exceed their parents’ earnings. And actually, it's interesting, because what seems to be really important here is the time that you measure the earnings. It's not to do with which cohort your born in so much as when we observe your earnings. So the key thing there is the people who do well in terms of absolute mobility were those who were 30 before the recession, and after the recession it has tanked. And it is the same for 40 year olds. If we observe their earnings before the recession, they were doing really well. But after the recession, they've tanked not quite as bad for them as the 30 year olds. But there's still a really strong story that recessions got a lot to do with this.

Christine Garrington  11:32

Really important finding. So what would you say then this body of work tells us about how younger generations, I've got a daughter in her 20s. So I'm keen to know and I know she's keen to know, how they're faring compared with me, their parents, it would seem to paint, unfortunately, rather a bleak picture, especially here in the UK, which is, which is something that you've clearly found. 

Jo Blanden 11:55

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And kind of preparing for our chat today, I was trying to think of something positive to say, and it's not that easy. So when you look around, see what think tanks says the resolution Foundation, I've got to say about this, they proposed things like a universal inheritance. So everybody will get £10,000 when they are, you know, I guess the 21 or 25. And that might help kind of even things out, they also talk a lot about helping young people get on to good career paths, which I think is really important. And actually I kind of chuckle at my students sometimes, because they seem to be so career focused at such a young age. But actually, maybe it's just different now. And maybe that's kind of how you how you need to be unfortunately, so any kind of government policy that can kind of smooth out and help young people get on the career ladder, I think, does seem to be quite useful. But it's definitely not an easy, not an easy question at all. And I think, partly because what we're seeing is we're seeing an overall decline in earnings, which is really hitting young people very hard. Before the recession, real earnings were growing by about 2% each year. Okay. Now, if that growth had carried on after 2007 and Brexit had hit, we wouldn't have a problem. In terms of absolute mobility, it would have stayed constant. So it really is all about earnings. And that raises some big macro and micro economic questions as to how we can really improve those young people. 

Christine Garrington  13:25

From your perspective, Jo, I wonder if you think there are any particular sort of key takeaway points for policymakers who would keep telling us that they want you to generations to fare better than the earlier ones? 

Jo Blanden 13:36

So the UK has been in this kind of productivity puzzle ever since the Great Recession. And economists have spent quite a lot of time thinking about this. So has this problem come about because we're not innovating enough? Because maybe we have run out of ideas? Is it because actually we are innovating, but it's just in ways that are really hard to measure, so we can't capture the kind of value added of technology etc. So that's one possibility. The other the other possibility is that actually, a lot of this is caused by the austerity before the Great Recession. And actually, you know, we need to kind of ease up a little bit for demand to actually be created so that output can rise. So that's one side of the story is this productivity, productivity puzzle, and I think that's essential for young people. And the other side of it, of course, is prices. The way that we look at this is whether earnings are actually growing faster than prices. Well, the recent events with Brexit have actually led to quite a strong price rise with the fall in the pound. And so that's not going to help young people if that continues or worsens. There are some really kind of quite important big economic stories here that government needs to address. And it's not particularly clear how they can how they can do that. But of course, the current kind of political nonsense that we're in does make it really hard in the UK at least to focus on any of these big issues. 

Christine Garrington  14:55

Jo Blanden is one of the keynote speakers at the Dynamics of Inequality Across the Lifecourse midterm in June 2019. More information is available on the DIAL website at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Listed in: Education

Florencia Torche: acute stress in-utero - can it damage baby's health and life chances?

Transcript

Christine Garrington  0:00  

Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In today's episode, we're asking whether and how acute stress might affect the lives of children, even if it's experienced in the months before they're born. I'm joined by Professor Florencia Torche from Stanford University who has been looking at links between environmental stressors and children's outcomes, and how these exposures contribute to the persistence of poverty across generations.

Florence Torche 0:28 

It is the case that children that who grew up in poverty are much more likely than our children to be exposed to a wide range of environmental stressors and toxins. This includes natural disasters and violence in you know, your neighbourhood or the wider context. It includes lead toxicity, neighbourhood conflict, and so on. Now, we know that all these exposures that children are affected to are bad for them have a handful effects on their health, on their education, on their development. Because of that, these exposures are more likely to result in disadvantage in later life, and therefore inequality. That provides a link for early exposures as early as before birth, and then poverty in later life, and the reproduction of poverty across generations, because the poor kids are much more likely to be affected by these environmental exposures. 

Christine Garrington  1:40  

So that's the background, what aspects of children's lives have you focused on specifically and why?

Florence Torche 1:45

My research has specifically focused on prenatal exposures, exposures that happened even before birth, and then whether or not and to what extent those prenatal exposures affects children's health, as early as when they're born. So measure, for example, through birth weight, gestational age, and then there are those children's health as they grow up and enter into adolescence, their cognitive development and their education. These outcomes are crucial research indicates very clearly for their wellbeing as adults, right for whether they're going to have a comfortable life? Whether they're going to have a sufficient level of economic wellbeing? So if we're able to understand how they develop early in life, we will have a very good, very precise indicator of how well they will fare in adulthood. This is all embedded in a, what we call a lifecourse perspective. Basically, you want to understand what happened to people very early in their lifecourses, in order to be able to better understand and predict what will happen to them as they age, as they grow up and become adults

Christine Garrington  3:07  

Understood. So you've undertaken some work in the last few years, looking at the impact of an acutely stressful event. In this case, what we're talking about is an earthquake has happened in Chile, on outcomes for children whose mothers had experienced the earthquake while they were pregnant. What was your thinking behind this research? 

Florence Torche 3:27

Researchers have claimed one important reason why poverty so bad for children is that it causes stress and stress disrupt development early in life. Well, that claim is very reasonable. It's certainly possible, but it hasn't been proven. So I thought, how can I prove that it is stress, and not other correlates or consequences of poverty, that is really bad children? Of course, stress is correlated with many bad things that happen to people, right. So what my task was as a researcher was to find some source of stress that was uncorrelated with other, you know, harmful exposures, what I was searching for was a so called natural experiment. So a setting in which stress happens at random, and that I found with an earthquake, we with current technology, we don't know when and where an earthquake will occur in this country. In that case, an earthquake provide something very close to an experimental design in the sense that women who had the bad fortune of being exposed to a particular earthquake are randomly allocated to an earthquake acid were right because they are no different from women living in some other region of the country, where the earth quake did not happen. And then what I did was to examine what happened with the babies who were born to the women who happen to be exposed to the earthquake and compare that to other women who were pregnant in the same country at the same time, but in a region that was not exposed to the earthquake, and I that provided my so called control group.

Christine Garrington  5:24

So in this instance, we were looking to see if there might be some link between pregnant mums who experienced an earthquake and the weight that their baby was born. So before you tell us what you found there, can you just explain why a baby's birth weight is an important measurement or indicator to consider when we think about how they might get on later on in life? 

Florence Torche 5:40

And also another important birth outcome present is a gestational age. In particular, whether the baby was born low weight - that's below 2500 grams - and whether the baby was born preterm – that is before 30 weeks of gestation. The reason to choose these outcomes is that they provide the very first measure that we researchers can observe of the baby's health and wellbeing. And based on recent research, we know now, these birth outcomes, they predict infant mortality and morbidity. And furthermore, they predict childhood in development, cognitive and social emotional development, they predict educational attainment, and they even predict outcomes in adulthood, they predict earnings, they predict income, they predict your ability to marry and form a family. They predict a wide range of outcomes throughout the entire lifecourse. So they provide a very powerful indicator of, you know, opportunities and endowments of individuals at the starting gate of life. I do not mean that someone who is for low weight is doomed to having problems at all, but they increase the likelihood of having developmental or educational, and even economic limitations in quite substantial proportion. So they provide at the population level, a very good indication of a certain limitation that we may want to prepare for and we may want to take into account. 

Christine Garrington  7:30

Right, so let's move on to the important stuff, what you found and what you think we learned from what you found?

Florence Torche 7:36

The women who had the bad fortune of being exposed to these sorts of acute stress, the earthquake had babies that were on average, of lower birth weight, and they were substantially more likely to be born low weight and to be born preterm. So when I compare the women who experienced the earthquake, and the women who did not experience the earthquake, but gave birth at the same time, there was a substantial difference in the proportion of low weight babies and preterm babies. These harmful effect of the exposure to the earthquake was very clearly concentrated on the first trimester of gestation. Only for those women exposed early in the pregnancy, we found such a harmful effect on birth outcomes. This research provides strong evidence that exposure to acute stress is bad for a infant health. And given that we know that infant health is predictive of development and wellbeing later on in life, prenatal exposure to acute stress may have harmful effects throughout those babies lifecourses. What my research suggests is that exposure to acute stress, even if short term might be bad for children, if it happens before birth.

Christine Garrington  9:08

In a follow up paper, you looked at the longer-term effects on children's cognitive abilities tell us what you did there.

Florence Torche 9:15

There isn't that we just discussed finds a negative effect of stress on birth outcomes. And like I said, birth outcomes predict later disadvantage. But, of course, we want to know if it is indeed the case that prenatal stress has accumulated effect on children as they grow up and they develop? So in order to address this question, I did this a follow up research in which I still use the earthquake. And I follow up kids over time, and I measure their cognitive development when they were about seven years of age. And what I found there was that exposure to the stress so in utero, so prenatally had a significant negative effect on kids’ cognitive development. But importantly, this effect manifested itself only among poor children, there was no effect among the middle-class children. So it was an effect that was stratified by socio economic advantage. And that emerged only among families that were in poverty. 

Christine Garrington  10:28

So in another area of your work also, in a similar sort of way, has focused on these stressful situations that migrants find themselves in the US, particularly in recent times where some states have introduced new and what some might describe as extremely restrictive laws aimed at curbing migration. Now, tell us what you were looking at there and why you moved on to this topic.

Florence Torche 10:52

I see this research on the effect of a prenatal exposure to these restrictive immigration laws as part of the same research agenda, which is to really try to understand whether these sources of environmental stress experienced before birth matter to people. Sitting here, as you mentioned, is very different. Now, I'm looking at one particular a very restrictive immigration law that was passed in the state of Arizona, in the United States. This law was passed in 2010, the law implemented a series of restrictions, attempting to make life so difficult for undocumented immigrants that they would, quote unquote, self deport that they would leave basically, that was the stated objective of the law. And my interest was to try to understand whether the passage of this law affected the health of babies of immigrants, but not only of undocumented immigrants, but also of the entire immigrant population, including documented immigrants, and even perhaps the Hispanic population in the United States. In that particular state that wasn't immigrant that was US born, that it may have failed, or be seen as very close to the immigrant population. This research was based on the birth records for Arizona, and four other states that are used as control states by, in this attempt to try to isolate the effect of stress for the babies that were in utero. During the passage of this law, there was a detrimental effect on birth outcomes, again, only for the babies of immigrant women in Arizona. I compare these effects with pregnancies of a US born black and white women, and there was no effect. So in fact, I was able to document an effect, a negative effect on the immigrant population. 

Christine Garrington  13:12

One very surprising finding from your research in this area was that babies whose mothers have been exposed to violence, obviously another form of acute stress, and in this case, Homicide in Mexico, were heavier on average than those who were not. And these experiences reduced the overall proportion of babies with a low birth weight. What do you make of that? Because it seems rather counterintuitive, especially after all this other evidence that you've, that you've, you've put together.

Florence Torche 13:43

What happened in Mexico, during a period after the year 2000 is that there was an enormous increase of drug trafficking related violence. So my question was, is the increase in violence affecting the health of infants that are born in Mexico? And to my surprise, mothers exposed to local violence were likely to give birth to babies that were heavier on average, and less likely to be low weight. We did the research several times to just make sure that this finding was indeed a true finding. And once we convinced ourselves, we find we search for explanations. Those mothers that were exposed to violence in their municipality, were much more likely to seek prenatal care. It was the benefits of prenatal care that were able to more than compensate for any negative effect of violent exposure. Specifically, those moms who were exposed to violence started prenatal care areas and went to the doctor more often. It really captures the agency of women, in this case pregnant women, right. We just documented one mechanism that we may use to protect their pregnancy. Secondly, we found this effect only among poor women living in urban areas. And the reason is clear to see once you think about it, first of all, among more advantaged women, they were all using prenatal care. So there was less room for they increase use, right. So it was the poor women who, prior to exposure to violence, were may have not gone to the doctor early in their pregnancies who decided to do so. But only in urban settings, because in the Mexican case, in rural settings, they access to health care, and in this case, to prenatal care, it's very limited. So even if they wanted to go It was much more difficult to them, we may not be able to reduce substantially the exposure to stress, I mean, stress has happened in people's lives. And it may they may continue to happen even if we try to reduce them and even if we're successful person, but even so, if we are able to provide easy access, quick access to prenatal care of high quality, we may be able to at least counteract to some extent the noxious effects of a stress exposure.

Christine Garrington  16:39

I just before we sort of really wrap up and talk about the broader policy implications of your research, I want to ask you about one more bit of research that you did, where you looked at, where mothers have been caught up in a war situation. And once again, looked at the impact of that or the ramifications of that to the birth weight of their children. Tell us what you found there. 

Florence Torche 17:00

This research was conducted in in Israel in the northern part of Israel, in context of a of an armed conflict in which people who are living in northern Israel were vulnerable to missiles coming from across the border. So the babies born in that area after the war, were more likely to be low weight and preterm than babies born before or after, or in other regions of the country, suggesting once more that it is the exposure to acute stress that caused this decline. In in both a birth weight and gestational age, the actual damage of the missiles was extremely limited. In fact, virtually no missile landed in the area. So this provides clear indication that it was stress and not the actual consequence of the missile that produced the damage.

Christine Garrington  18:03

Florencia this is an important and fascinating body of work that you've done, what would you say, as a whole, it tells us about how this acute stress is acutely stressful events, impact on children's lives and also for what it means for how they will fare later on in life compared with those children who've had more of a stress free path into life. And certainly through the first few months and years of their life. What have we learned?

Florence Torche 18:30

We have now very persuasive evidence that stress experienced before birth has long term consequences we have clearly documented an affect in birth outcomes. And now my recent research documented an effect on cognitive ability and then subsequent educational attainment. Those early outcomes are so predictive, predictive of economic wellbeing later in life that we have a unfortunately, quite clear evidence that the children who have the bad fortune of being exposed of stressors before birth, may have trajectories that are more disadvantage than their peers. That they're they they're more likely to have developed health, developmental, and socio-economic limitations later in life. These to me highlights the relevance of including the prenatal period when we consider population health. The prenatal period is very easily neglected and forgotten. Because it's invisible. Unless we search for exposures before birth, we're not going to find them, but they're going to be consequential for the health and wellbeing of the next generation. So, in my view, my research and that of others, really highlights the importance of looking for these potentially harmful exposures that may happen even before birth, and to try to implement to the extent that is possible with policy strategies to try to compensate for the disadvantages that these exposures cause. It's not that we're gonna create a stress-free world, but we can certainly develop policies to try to compensate for the harmful effects of stress that are experienced even the solvency of 

Christine Garrington  20:27

Florencia Torche is one of the keynote speakers at the Dynamics of Inequality Across the Lifecourse midterm conference in June 2019. More information is available on the DIAL website at www.dynamicsofinequality.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast, which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Listed in: Education

Bram Hogendoorn: What does divorce have to do with the education poverty gap?

Transcript

In Episode 2 of the DIAL podcast, Bram Hogendoorn from the University of Amsterdam discusses the DIAL Working Paper, Divorce and the growth of poverty over the life course: a risk and vulnerability approach. The research is part of the NORFACE-funded project, Critical  Life Events and the Dynamics of Inequality: Risk, Vulnerability and Cumulative Disadvantage (CRITEVENTS).

Christine Garrington  0:00  

Welcome to DIAL. A podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In today's episode we're asking what is divorce got to do with the poverty gap between higher and lower educated people? I'm joined by Bram Hogendoorn from the University of Amsterdam, whose NORTHFACE-funded research shows that family dynamics matter, and the policy could do more to ensure that divorce doesn't aggravate economic inequalities.

Bram Hogendoorn  0:26  

Numerous studies have shown that divorce is associated with increases in poverty. This makes sense because people suddenly have to make a living off of one income only. But those are just averages so when we start zooming in, we see large differences between different people. For instance, men often only suffer short term economic consequences of divorce, whereas some women fall into poverty for prolonged periods of time. In our research, we are not only interested in gender differences but also differences by education. So, we know that poverty rates among lower educated people, increase over the lifecourse, whereas poverty rates among higher educated people are pretty stable. So, the poverty gap between lower and higher educated people grows as they age, and we want to know what this has to do with divorce.

Christine Garrington  1:17  

Okay so, as you mentioned that your research is really quite focused on the role of education in all of this, but your approach to this question is really rather different from what's gone before. I wonder if you can explain a bit about how it's different? And why it is you think that this particular approach is important to a better understanding of the impacts of divorce?

Bram Hogendoorn  1:35  

Yeah. So there are two pathways by which divorce may increase the poverty gap between lower and higher educated people. The first pathway is that lower educated people may simply divorce more often and previous studies confirm this, but these studies assume that divorce affects people of different education in the same way which need not be true. The second pathway is that lower educated people may be hit harder by a given divorce, and there's very few studies on this. Moreover, the problem there is that, you know, these studies looking at the second pathway only look at people who are divorced, so they ignore the different probabilities of getting a divorce in the first place. In our research what we try to do is to integrate both pathways from divorced poverty. And in that way we can understand how divorce affects the growth of poverty gaps between education levels.

Christine Garrington  2:29  

Right so where and who did you get your information from to help you look at this issue?

Bram Hogendoorn  2:34  

We use data from the Netherlands. The Dutch government has extensive population registers, and it knows the educational credentials, marital status, and earnings of almost all its residents. And thanks to these registers we have many observations, and we don't have any missing data, due to non-response for instance.

Christine Garrington  2:55  

When you talk about the vulnerability to the consequences of divorce, which is what we're talking about in this paper, what exactly do you mean? Just explain that for us.

Bram Hogendoorn  3:05  

People typically think of vulnerability, as the emotional problems that come with divorce. And you know that that's definitely an important issue, but our research focuses on economic vulnerability, which we define as the probability of falling into poverty. While the reason to focus on this is that falling into poverty forms a serious threat to the well-being of adults and their children. So we believe that this form of economic vulnerability is a very relevant outcome to the study.

Christine Garrington  3:38  

So when it came to which educational group was most at risk of divorce, what did you find there specifically?

Bram Hogendoorn  3:45  

We divided our groups into three levels of education, so low, middle, and high. And we found that 10 years after marriage – 12% of the higher educated were divorced, 21% of the middle educated were divorced and almost 30% of the lower educated were divorced. So the lower educated are most at risk of divorce.

Christine Garrington  4:08  

And was this group also most vulnerable to those negative consequences of divorce that you were talking about? 

Bram Hogendoorn  4:15  

Yeah, that's correct. The lower educators that weren't only more likely to divorce, but they're also more vulnerable when a divorce occurs. So for instance, out of one divorce, the poverty rate of higher educated people increases from about 5 to 8%, whereas the poverty rates of an over educated people increase from 18 to 35%.

Christine Garrington  4:35  

And how did these negative effects manifest themselves over the lifecourse? Because that's quite an important aspect of your work as well. So as people got older and their lives continued how did those problems, how did those vulnerabilities those difficulties, those negative effects shows themselves?

Bram Hogendoorn  4:50  

We noticed that eventually most people recover and managed to get out of the poverty situation again. So that's very positive. Yet, at the same time, the higher educated recovered faster than average.

Christine Garrington  5:04  

And, were there any differences between men and women at all? Men compared with women?

Bram Hogendoorn  5:09  

Yeah, there, there are important differences between men and women. When it comes to the economic consequences of divorce. So, when speaking about childless couples, we find that women suffer somewhat more from divorce than men do. But when it comes to parents the differences are huge. For instance, the poverty rate of lower educated mothers increases from about 30%, before divorce to about 60% in the year of divorce, which means that 60% of all lower educated divorced mothers, basically, or, you know, right after the split. And for lower educated fathers almost nothing changes, you know I'm talking here about the budget contexts, but I'm pretty sure that this also generalises to for instance the UK or Switzerland and also some other countries. So it probably has to do with the fact that Dutch women work fewer hours unpaid labour, and often assume responsibility for the children after divorce.

Christine Garrington  6:11  

Those are quite striking figures aren't they? So what do you what would you say that we learn about the poverty gaps resulting from divorce in these different groups and what does that tell us about how inequality plays out over people's lives?

Bram Hogendoorn  6:23  

That's an important question. And we can conclude that the lower educated, have a double disadvantage. They divorced more often, and they are more economically vulnerable to those divorces. And as a result, economic inequality between lower and higher education groups grows as their lives unfold.

Christine Garrington  6:41  

And clearly inequality a big area for policymakers who would like to tackle it and reduce those gaps, what would you say that your approach, well would you say that your approach provides us with a rather more nuanced and better understanding of what it might mean for, for those policymakers, not just in the Netherlands, but as you were saying just there elsewhere in the UK other similar countries? You know, people who are looking to reduce inequality of this kind.

Bram Hogendoorn  7:08  

Yeah. Our approach distinguishes between the risk of divorce, and economic vulnerability of divorce, and we can show that both pathways play a role in the growth of inequality, but we also show that the relative importance of these pathways differs between subgroups. So this means that policymakers must realise that economic inequalities are affected by family dynamics. For example, current rules of joint taxation for married couples benefits some education levels more than others, or rules of spousal maintenance questions on education levels more against divorce than they do others to others. So, our research could inform changes in these policies, so that divorce does not aggravate economic inequality

Christine Garrington  7:56  

Divorce and the growth of poverty over the life course: a risk and vulnerability approach is a DIAL working paper by Bram Hogendoorn, Thomas Leopold and Thijs Bol. It can be downloaded at www.dynamicsofinequality.org, where you can also find details of all the DIAL research projects. Thanks for listening to this episode of our podcast which is presented and produced by Chris Garrington and edited by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen.

Listed in: Education

Andreas Peichl: income inequality: should we measure it differently?

Listed in: Education