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In the final episode of the DIAL podcast we’re looking at what’s been learned from DIAL projects about how and when inequality manifests in our lives and what its longer term consequences might be. We're joined by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen from the University of Turku in Finland. Elina is the Scientific Coordinator for DIAL and, as the programme draws to a close she reflects on some of the programme’s highlights,  key findings and implications for the future.   Transcript Christine Garrington  0:00  Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series four, we're looking at what's been learned from DIAL projects about how and when inequality manifests in our lives, and what its longer-term consequences might be. For this final episode of the series, we're delighted to be joined by Elina Kilpi-Jakonen, from the University of Turku in Finland. Elina is the scientific co-ordinator for DIAL and today, as the programme draws to a close, she's here to reflect on some of the program's highlights, key findings and implications for the future. So welcome, Elina thank you very much indeed, for joining us. Now, first of all, I'm guessing it's been no mean feat and indeed, I know, it's been no mean feat, keeping an eye across 13 fantastic research projects with researchers based all over Europe. But just take a minute or two, if you would to remind us of what exactly the DIAL programme is and what it's involved over the last few years. Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  0:57  So thanks a lot, Chris. The DIAL programme is, as you said, kind of transnational programme. And we've had 13 research projects involved. And all of those involve international collaboration. And it's based in the social sciences and behavioural sciences, financed by NORFACE, which is a research organisation bringing together different funding institutes across Europe. And so the focus of DIAL has been on inequality and in particular inequality across the life course and trying to understand some of the structures of inequality cross nationally and some of the mechanisms kind of producing inequality and and what that means to people and societies as a whole. Christine Garrington  1:41  Wonder if I can ask you why it has been so important to look not just at inequality, per se, as you were saying there, but at how inequality manifests itself over the life course, because this is an important thing, isn't it? And indeed how, when and where it sort of accumulates? Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  1:57  Inequality is a really complex and multifaceted issue. And so I think one one part of it is that inequality comes across in many different domains. So it's important to take into account inequalities, for example, in education, labour market, health, and so on. And then I mean, to really understand where it comes from and what it means it's important to look at the determinants across time, I mean, both across time for an individual and their parents, and so on, kind of that life course aspect, but also, for countries to see how it develops across time. Inequality isn't something that just is, I mean, it develops. And so kind of building on that kind of developmental process to really kind of inform us about how we can do something about it, or how we can really kind of understand where it comes from, it's important to take that into account. Christine Garrington  2:58  Now, you talked about the programme largely being based in the social sciences. But one of the key things about the project is that we've seen researchers from different disciplines as well as different countries coming together to try to tackle, as you say, as you rightly say, this incredibly complex area around inequality, what's been the thinking there? Elina Kilpi-Jakonen  3:20  Well, I mean, inequality is something that interests a lot of academics working in different disciplines. And, and they come from it from from kind of different angles. And I th

In Episode 5 of Series 4 of the DIAL Podcast we’re in conversation with Andreas Peichl, Professor of Macroeconomics and Public Finance at the University of Munich and Principal Investigator of a DIAL project looking at the impact of childhood circumstances on individual outcomes over the life-course (IMCHILD).    Transcript Christine Garrington  0:00  Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series four, we're looking at what's been learned from DIAL projects about how and when inequality manifests in our lives, and what its longer-term consequences might be. Today, we're delighted to be joined by Andreas Peichl, Professor of Macroeconomics and Public Finance at the University of Munich, and Principal Investigator of a DIAL project looking at the Impact of Childhood Circumstances on Individual Outcomes over the Life-Course. So, welcome, Andreas, thank you very much for joining us. And I wonder if you can start by telling us a bit about what this project has been investigating and why? Andreas Peichl  0:39  So the project IMCHILD the Impact of Childhood Circumstances on Individual Outcomes over the Life-Course, had the aim to investigate how early decisions that usually parents make for their children's are really at the beginning of life, the early childhood, how these what we call circumstances for the child. So this is something that children typically cannot influence. Because these are decisions by made mostly by parents, how these circumstances affect decisions later in life. So for example, the transition to adulthood, be it educational or occupational choices, family formation, or later labour market outcomes. And the really, the idea was to see whether we find that the early childhood circumstances matter later in life. And then the next question, if this is the case, was what are the causal links? What are the mechanisms for this? And also, what can policymakers do about it if they aim at achieving something like equality of opportunity? So what can policymakers do to to level the playing field, so to say, later in life. Christine Garrington  1:54  Now, I'm interested to know as we record this conversation, COVID is something we certainly seem to be learning to live with right now, although COVID wasn't an issue, when you started this project, it certainly became one. And you've taken time to consider which children have been most affected by school closures for example. Can you tell us a bit about what you found there? Andreas Peichl  2:14  First, what we found is that in any country that we looked at, and especially in Germany, that was the main focus of this part of the analysis, but we also looked at other countries. That low achieving students, so students that were already not doing too well, in school, they were affected the most. And at the same time, students from non academic parents and lower socioeconomic status backgrounds, they were also affected the most. So sometimes, it's a combination of those two factors that are the same children, so low achieving, and low socio-economic status, but it's not exclusive. So, in general, low achieving students and lower socio-economic background, especially non-academic parents, those were the kids that were affected the most by, for example, school closures. But in general, we see that there was a large decrease in learning time for all students in school. And so basically, the whole cohort, were really affected by this. Christine Garrington  3:21  Right and, of course, as we, as we say, as we talked about learning to live with COVID, there are going to be already are, if you like longer term implications of this for children, educators and policymakers who are keen to ensure that any pre-existing inequalities don't become more deeply ingrained. Have I got that right? Andreas Peichl  3:42  Yes. So it's, it's really through it, we need to make sure that these existing inequalities d

In Episode 4 of Series 4 we're talking to Professor Sakari Lemola from the University of Bielefeld and formerly from the University of Warwick. Sakari is one of the Principal Investigators of the DIAL project PremLife, which has been looking at what factors can provide protection and increase resilience for preterm children’s life course outcomes.  Transcript Christine Garrington  0:00  Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series four, we're looking at what's been learned from DIAL projects about how and when inequality manifests in our lives, and what its longer-term consequences might be. For this episode, we're delighted to be joined by Professor Sakari Lemola. He's from the University of Bielefeld and formally from the University of Warwick, and one of the Principal Investigators of the DIAL project, PremLife, which has been looking at what factors can provide protection and increase resilience for preterm children's life course outcomes. So Sakari, thank-you so much for joining us today. It's great to have you on the DIAL podcast. I wonder if you can start by telling us a bit more specifically what this project has been investigating and why? Sakari Lemola  0:45  So the PremLife project has been particularly focused on the role of protective factors for social and educational transitions after preterm birth. Preterm birth is defined as birth before the 37th gestational week. Then there are two further categories one distinguishes between moderately to late preterm children at its birth between the 32nd and 36th gestational week - moderately and late preterm children. But they're also very preterm children who are born before the 32nd gestational week. So in the PremLife project, we specifically look at both of these groups - the very preterm children and moderately and late preterm children compared to term born children and try to figure out what are their disadvantages they have in their lives? And also, what are protective factors that may improve their outcomes? In some domains they actually do really well when certain protective factors are present. Christine Garrington  1:50  Can you tell us something about how common preterm births are? Sakari Lemola  1:54  The incidence of preterm birth has been rising in the last few decades. So in the UK, around 7% of all babies are born preterm each year. This means that two children in an average sized primary school class are likely to have been born preterm and in spite of the advances in neonatal care of preterm birth in the last few decades, and also decreasing mortality rates, which is a very good thing. Negative long term, sequels and consequences of preterm birth have still remained, particularly for very preterm children, those born before the 32nd gestational week that means eight weeks too early or even earlier than that. That leads to medical complications, which often require distressing but life saving treatments frequent are, for instance, neonatal asphyxia, hypoxia due to immature lungs. Necessary treatment involves ventilation, continuous positive airway pressure, surfactant treatment, but also treatment with stress hormones, prenatal corticosteroids treatments to accelerate the long development. Christine Garrington  3:10  And so Sakari what does life look like for those children compared with their full-term born peers? Sakari Lemola  3:16  They often have an increased risk for poor cognitive development, they show poor educational outcomes, less favourable employment outcomes in adulthood and increased risk for developing mental health problems. And in the PremLife project, we try to specifically answer the question, first of all, of course, what are protective factors for those born preterm. But also we try to focus also to figure out out about what are the social and emotional development of the preterm birth, particularly related to social relationships, wellbeing a

In Episode 3 of Series 4 of the DIAL Podcast, we are in discussion with Richard Blundell. Richard is the Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at UCL, director of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the principal investigator of a DIAL project looking at human capital and inequality during adolescence and working life. In this episode we explore the work done by this project tackling inequalities in adolescence and working life.   Transcript Christine Garrington  0:00  Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series four, we're looking at what's been learned from DIAL projects about how and when inequality manifests in our lives and what its longer-term consequences might be. For this episode, we're delighted to be joined by Richard Blundell, David Ricardo Professor of Political Economy at UCL, and director of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Richard is also the principal investigator of a DIAL project, looking at human capital and inequality during adolescence and working life. So welcome, Richard, thank you very much for joining us today. Richard Blundell  0:40  Thank you, Christine. Christine Garrington  0:41  I wonder if you can just start by telling us a little more specifically what this project has been investigating and why. Richard Blundell  0:48  Yeah, I'd be delighted to. What we're looking at in this project is the evolution of inequality through adolescence and working life. Relating to the education streams, people choose how it affects their outcomes going forward into working life, what happens during working life, what kind of training seems to work, what routes to better jobs are for people who don't, for example, go to higher education, university. Whether training can offset some of the gender gaps that we've been seeing opening up in the labour market, and whether choices in higher education matter for future labour market outcomes. So it's very much about not the early years of school - there's another project looking at that, that runs in parallel with our project, similar investigators, we're working together with them. What we're looking at here then is from adolescence onwards, and how the inequality evolves during adolescence and working life. Christine Garrington  1:58  So one area of focus has been women and work really very, very interested in in this, you've looked at the gender pay gap, the role of childcare, on women's ability to return to work, and indeed, on the role of job training, among other things. So what would you say for you are the key things to have emerged from this particular area of work Richard? Richard Blundell  2:18  Yes, this is obviously absolutely central, the kind of pay gap between men and women and how it opens up through working life is something that's been really hard to tackle and getting behind this, what are the drivers of it, and how to address it is really key to solving some of the most important inequalities that we see in working life. We're working with researchers, mainly economists, and education researchers in Norway, in the UK and in France. That's rather good, because those three countries have rather different systems of routes through education, into work, and different opportunities for women and men as they progress through their working life. And we wanted to understand what those differences could tell us about the gender pay gap. And therefore what policies could be perhaps most useful in addressing the gender pay gap. Christine Garrington  3:25  There are a couple of key things to come out of this one there. Richard Blundell  3:28  Some of its, you know, in some sense, pretty obvious. That is that work experience is really important for pay and for earnings as you go through your career for career progression. And of cours

In Episode 2 of Series 4 of the DIAL Podcast, we are in discussion with Professor Hans van Kippersluis from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. Hans, a professor of applied economics, is the Principal Investigator on the DIAL project, Gene Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities, which has used innovative methods and data to explore the interplay between nature and nurture in generating health and education inequalities.   Transcript Christine Garrington  0:00   Welcome to DIAL, a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series four, we're looking at what's been learned from some of the DIAL projects about how and when inequality manifests in our lives, and what its longer term consequences might be. For this second episode of the series, we're delighted to be joined by Hans van Kippersluis, Professor of Applied Economics at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. And Principal Investigator of the DIAL project, Gene Environment Interplay in the Generation of Health and Education Inequalities - put more simply nature versus nurture. So Hans, welcome to the podcast. And I wonder if you can start by talking us through what researchers working on this project have actually been looking into. Hans van Kippersluis  0:42   What we've been doing in this project is essentially incorporating the recent availability of genetic data into social science and most prominently economic analysis. And so most of our work has focused on the interplay between genes and the environment. So in the introduction, you mentioned nature versus nurture, but actually more accurately, what we're doing is nature and nurture jointly into how they shape essentially education and health outcomes. And I think this is also the main innovation of our project, because biologists have studied nature before; social scientists have  of course, extensively studied nurture, but not many have studied the interplay, the interaction between the two. And I think this was sort of the main innovation for why we got the funding some five years ago. And so what we have done is mostly studying this interplay. But along the way, we have also made some methodological contributions to a field which is very new. Then we've also used genetic data to test all their theories, and also, I think, enrich the framework of equality of opportunity. Christine Garrington  1:35   Yeah, fantastic project. And as you've just said, you've made unprecedented use of genomic as well as survey data in the research, tell us a bit more about the information that you've been able to access? And how you've been able to use it? Hans van Kippersluis 1:47   Yeah, sure. So the interesting thing is that more and more social science datasets, so data sets that have been traditionally used by social scientists, and these are mostly extensive surveys,  are now collecting DNA information from their respondents. And this is often from blood or saliva. And what they did is basically, so more than 99% of DNA is the same across human beings. And so what we are using is only this remaining less than 1% of the variation. And these are called snips. And snips are points of your DNA that differ across human beings. And there's roughly 1 million of them. And so what we do, basically also other people have done is sort of aggregating these tiny effect sizes into an index. And this is called the polygenic index. And this is telling us something about your genetic predisposition towards a certain outcome. And this is quite interesting, because this data, this new variable, essentially can be added to existing datasets. And so we have a wealth of information that has been collected in the past on surveys on existing data. And then we simply add one indicator, one new variable. This is telling us something about people's genetic predisposition. And just to be clear, this is not like a deterministic variable. It also exhibits quite a b

In Episode 1 of Series 4 of the DIAL Podcast we're in discussion with Professor Kjell Salvanes and Dr Helen Wareham to talk about the impact of inequality on the lives of children. Kjell is the Principal Investigator on Growing up Unequal? The Origins, Dynamics and Lifecycle Consequences of Childhood Inequalities while Helen is a Research Associate on the project Social InEquality and its Effects on Child Development.    Transcript Christine Garrington  0:00  Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to inequality over the lifecourse. In Series 4 we're looking at what's been learned from DIAL projects about how and when inequality manifests in our lives, and what its longer-term consequences might be. For this first episode of the series, we're delighted to be joined by Professor Kjell Salvanes and Dr. Helen Wareham to talk about the impact of inequality on the lives of children. Kjell heads up a project called Growing up Unequal? The Origins, Dynamics and Lifecycle Consequences of Childhood Inequalities, while Helen is a research associate on the project, Social InEquality and its Effects on child Development. So Helen, let's start with the work that you and your team have been doing, looking at how young children are getting on and where inequalities might be occurring. I wonder if you can just start by explaining really a bit more about that the main focus of your project. Helen Wareham  0:50  So the main focus of SEED, that's the acronym we have the project is to identify the mechanisms that social inequalities have on children's, particularly their oral language development, and where we can try and identify what patterns there are in those inequalities, and the impact that it has, and whether those continue throughout children's lives, and into adulthood as well. We're a team of around 20 researchers, and we're quite a broad range of specialists. So we have everything from speech therapists, developmental psychologists, but also medical staff, so ENT, ear, nose and throat specialists. And we're spread across a number of countries, as well. So there's a sort of focus around the countries involved in the project. So that's Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, but also how we can look across those different countries and with broader collaborations with teams in France, the USA and Australia as well. Christine Garrington  1:44  So tell us a bit about what your team of 20 researchers in all these different countries has been actually doing over the last few years. Helen Wareham  1:51  In the three main countries for the project, we have really rich cohort data. So that's where people have been interviewed they've there's been kind of assessments that have happened with children, quite often from birth, and then they've been tracked at regular points throughout their lives. And these create really rich data sources. So we can look at what happens in children's lives and how that then changes over, over time. Because we have this rich data, we're able to look for really complex novel methods to try and understand the impact that inequalities have on children's lives over time. And a lot of the work in our projects has been driven by PhD students. They've been looking at everything from the impact of slight and mild hearing loss on children. So my colleague Lisanne who's based at Rostam University in the Erasmus Medical Centre there has found that there's a significant impact on behavioural and school performance in children where they have the kind of slight or mild hearing loss, that's all just so clinical, but just enough that it's obviously then impacting their later life. And then my colleagues, Natalie and Wei have been looking at the interactions between parenting behaviours, and children's language and behaviour development. And then my colleague, Claudia has been looking particularly at instances of sort of poverty and how that impacts on children's language development. Christine Garrington

In Episode 16 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast we’re discussing ability grouping in UK primary schools and how it affects children's enjoyment of certain subjects. Our guest today is Queralt Capsada-Munsech from the University of Glasgow, who as part of DIAL's LIFETRACK project has been looking at primary school children's enjoyment of English and Maths at age seven, and later at age 11 to see whether ability grouping positively or negatively impacts their enjoyment of those subjects.  Does ability grouping affect UK primary school pupils’ enjoyment of Maths and English? is research by Vikki Boliver and Queralt Capsada-Munsech, and is published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.   Transcript Christine Garrington  0:00  Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune into evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In this episode, we're talking about how grouping children by ability at school affects their enjoyment of certain subjects. Our guest is Queralt Capsada-Munsech from the University of Glasgow, who as part of DIAL's Life Track project has been looking at primary school children's enjoyment of English and Maths at age seven, and later at age 11 to see whether ability grouping positively or negatively impacts their enjoyment of those subjects.   Queralt Capsada-Munsech  0:29  There are people who are advocates of ability grouping, and their main argument is usually that high ability pupils improve their attainment, while there is no detriment in lower ability, once their academic performance mainly. But you know, the opponents in the general debate of ability grouping, what they say is that high ability students only do marginally better when they are grouped with a, yeah with a group of students that are homogenous to them. While lower ability ones are the ones that are substantially worse off from these ability grouping. And what we have seen mostly in previous research is that there is the main mechanism that we call that is the self-fulfilling prophecy of low attainment that you know, because you are grouping the low ability grouping and people, and students are aware of that. So they just know that they are not doing as well. And they continue to do more poorly while those that are in the high ability grouping, so they think better of themselves. And that leads them to better academic achievement. And usually, the way it has been measured has been based on what we call academic self-concept that basically is asking students, how good are you at maths, at English or at school in general?  Christine Garrington  1:48  So talk us through some of the policy context here - ability grouping as an education policy. Queralt Capsada-Munsech   1:53  In the gaze of the UK ability grouping was encouraged by the New Labour governments in the 1990s and in the 2000s. And the main idea was that it would raise standards generally, with higher grades in brightest kids in particular, that was something that was quite influential in past decades. And that had clearly an effect in policy because, you know, the prevalence of grouping practices still remains in place. And it increased quite a lot for the past few years. And we see in the UK, even that ability grouping is becoming increasingly common in early years, you know, at ages three and four and even in Key Stage One ages five to seven was, which was something that we didn't see in the past. While you know, in the 1990s, there were fewer than 3% of primary schools who reported that they were streaming students by 2008 16% of seven year olds, were being streamed by ability for all subjects and 26% were being taught in ability sets for English and Math so that's quite the change. Christine Garrington  3:01  What was it for you that you wanted to look at exactly about the way in which children are grouped by ability at primary school? What was it you wanted to look at and why? Queralt Capsada-Munsech   3:10  Empirical evidence what di

In Episode 15 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast we’re discussing LGBT discrimination, harassment and violence. Our guests are Sait Bayrakdar from Kings College London and Andrew King from the University of Surrey who, as part of DIAL’s CILIA project have been using a large cross national survey to look at the experiences of nearly 29,000 people living in Germany the UK and Portugal. LGBT discrimination, harassment and violence in Germany, Portugal and the UK: A quantitative comparative approach is research by Sait Bayrakdar and Andrew King and is published in the journal Current Sociology.   Transcript Christine Garrington  0:00  Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In this episode, we're discussing LGBT discrimination, harassment and violence. Our guests are Sait Bayrakdar from King's College London and Andrew King from the University of Surrey, who, as part of DIAL's CILIA project have been using a large cross-national survey to look at the experiences of nearly 29,000 people living in Germany, the UK and Portugal. I asked Andrew first to talk us through the background to the research.   Andrew King  0:30  This piece of research is part of the larger CILIA LGBTQI project, which has been exploring inequalities across the lives of LGBTQI people in four European countries - England, Scotland, Germany, and Portugal. We had a large research team from four different institutions on the project. And they brought expertise from different disciplines, as well as different methodologies. So the main aims of the CILIA project were to study LGBTQI inequalities from an intersectional and lifecourse perspective and bring some comparative dimensions to this. We started with a literature review and survey mapping exercise, which helped us document what had been done so far in the area, then we went on to analyse various sources of data, as well as collecting a large qualitative data set from LGBTQI individuals in the four countries. But this research article reports on the research, which was a part of our quantitative strand.   Christine Garrington  1:43  Okay, that's great. Thanks Andrew. I'm going to come back to you a little bit later in our discussion for your sort of reflections on what was was found. But Sait you were the lead author on this, and what was it specifically that you wanted to try to get to grips with and why in this particular paper?   Sait Bayrakdar  1:58  We were aware from our qualitative research that despite over 10 years of equality legislation, issue of discrimination, harassment, and violence we're still very significant to LGBT people, but we wanted to look at this both quantitatively and cross nationally. In a nutshell, we were mainly interested in understanding the patterns of discrimination, harassment and violence experienced by LGBT individuals in these countries. But this was quite tricky, because most survey studies still do not collect information about sexual orientation or gender identity. And it is even more difficult to find an international study that collects data from individuals across different countries. One exception to this was the LGBT survey conducted by the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency. And this data allowed us to do a comparative analysis across the countries in the CILIA project. In fact, this really was the on the Pan-European data set that spoke to these inequalities. Also, we wanted to document the diverse experiences and patterns within LGB and T communities. Partly because of data limitations, and small numbers in surveys, these different groups are often merged in a single category as LGBT. Although their experiences differ quite a lot. And our results also come from these differences. Qualitative researchers are quite ahead in this regard. And they have done amazing studies showing the diversity in experiences and outcomes. We hope this research will help us show these differences qu

In Episode 14 of Series 3 of our podcast, we talk with Professor Andrés Rodríguez-Pose from the London School of Economics about his research looking at who propelled Donald Trump to power and what the future holds for populist politicians, politics and policies?     Transcript  Christine Garrington  0:01  Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the lifecourse. In this episode, we're discussing the rise of populism in the US with Andres Rodriguez-Pose at the London School of Economics. He has been asking the intriguing question of who exactly propelled Donald Trump to power and what the future holds for populist politicians, politics and policies?   Andres Rodriguez-Pose  0:25  I've always been interested in populism and the rise of populism. And I do it feel that many of the explanations of why people vote for, let's say, anti-system parties and anti-system options, were probably not the most adequate. Of many voters of populism have been considered to be uneducated, poor, rural and white men. And very often, it has been said that we just have to wait for these people to die and then the problem will sort itself out. I think that's first macabre and not a joke. And second, I do feel that that is also wrong. Because the people that are voting for anti-system parties, both in the US and in Europe, probably have got and certainly have got you know grievances that are related very often, to the long-term economic, social, cultural, and surface decline of the places where they live. But urban elites have tended and political elites have had a tendency to tell them that they are rednecks, that they are despicable, that they live in flyover states and in places where there's no opportunity, and the best solution for them is just to get on their bikes and move to a place where there's opportunity, which mainly means the big cities in from that perspective,   Christine Garrington  1:48  Indeed, and so what was it about Trump's election and obviously near re-election, that you wanted to sort of hone in on and look at specifically and why?   Andres Rodriguez-Pose  1:57  Trump, in my view, represented from his arrival, a threat to democracy and to American democracy that traditionally was the beacon of democracy across the world. It also represented the radicalization of the Republican Party that had been traditionally mainstream. And for me, that was really interesting trying to understand what had driven voters in certain parts of the US to vote for Trump, especially in the light of what Robert Putnam, probably the best known political scientist in the world from Harvard University, had written 20 years ago, well in 2000, about the potential threats. to threats to American democracy, which was where coming from, on the one hand, the rise of inequality in the US a country that is far more polarised interpersonally than Europe, but where territorial disparities are significantly lower. And the other challenge, which was the parallel declines since the 1970s, and 1980s of what is he called social capital, which is the sense of interaction, community, and cohesion within localities and within American cities, towns and rural areas.   Christine Garrington  3:15  Now you went about this by carrying out an econometric analysis. For those of us who might not sort of immediately understand what that looks like, in reality, I wonder if you can tell us what you actually did?   Andres Rodriguez-Pose  3:25  Well, I wanted to explain what is known as the Trump margin. So the additional votes that Donald Trump received in 2016, and then in 2020, relative to the votes that a perfectly mainstream Republican candidate in the 2012 election, like Mitt Romney had received. So trying to explain the additional extra percentages of votes in specific counties in the US on the basis of a series of factors I thought, and my co-authors thought that the additional vote for Trump was very

In Episode 6 of Series 2 of our podcast, we talk with Professor Anette Fasang from Humboldt University and Professor Silke Aisenbrey from Yeshiva University about their research looking at how inequality plays out in the parallel work and lives of black men and women in the United States. Transcript Christine Garrington  0:00  Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In this series, we discuss findings from DIAL's Equal Lives project, which looks at how inequality impacts the lives of young adults. Our guests are Anette Fasang and Silke Aisenbrey, they've been looking at the parallel work and family lives of black and white men and women aged 22 to 44 in the United States. I started by asking Anette to explain the background to their work. Anette Fasang  0:27  So recently, or for a longer while actually there has been quite a bit of talk about intersectional inequalities, so overlapping categories of inequality, very prominently, gender and race that we also look at in our paper. And here the ideas that black women, for example, face specific disadvantages that white women don't, but that are also different from the challenges that, for example, black men face. And this is a type of our field of research that often works with qualitative data, for example, or is quite theoretical also activism oriented. And that's actually not at all where Silke and I come from, we are more sort of quantitative statistics oriented people do inequality research in this area. But we found this new intersectionality approach extremely important, and tried to get sort of a quantitative what we call life course, perspective on intersectional inequalities. And for us, the life course perspective here is really important. Because when you think about differences between social groups, if you measure them at one point in time, for example, their incomes at age 30, you will, of course, find differences, and you'll find inequality. But what we try to do is follow people really from age 20, to age 40, to see how different types of advantages and disadvantages accumulate, because what accumulates over the life course, tends to be much larger than disparities measured at any specific time point. And we think that's particularly important when you're trying to assess differences between social groups, to not understate the actual extent of disadvantages and advantages that people accumulate over time, Silke Aisenbrey  2:17 Where we are coming from, it's really to look at at the life of a person in terms of a movie, like understand it really, as this bigger concept and understand every step of the way, as a result of what happened before. Anette and I did like a big project where we did something similar, where we addressed similar questions about the intersection of careers and family careers, so to speak, where we compare Germany and the US. And in that research, we found that there's a lot happening within the US that we actually can't get a grip on. So that was the start off point for this project, where we're like, there's so much race segregation in these life courses happening in the US that we actually want to kind of look deeper into that. Christine Garrington  3:07 Anette then just take us a little bit more deeply then into what it was you were looking specifically in this paper to get to grips with and why? Anette Fasang  3:15  Yes, we used a great data source, the so called National Longitudinal Study of youth for the United States, which has followed individuals for many years, re-interviewing them every year. And here we could for men and women born in the 60s, we could reconstruct their entire life courses from age 20 to 40. So their educational and work careers, when they were in school, when they finish, whether they were unemployed, whether they were on family leave, and which types of jobs they were in, where we could

In Episode 5 of Series 2 of our podcast, we talk to Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez from the University of Berlin and Susan Harkness from the University of Bristol about research from the DIAL funded Equal Lives project on the gendered division of housework during lockdown and whether or not changes that happened were temporary or long-lasting. Gender division of housework during the COVID-19 pandemic: Temporary shocks or durable change?  is research published in Demographic Research by Alejandra Rodríguez-Sánchez, Anette Fasang and Susan Harkness. Transcript Christine Garrington  0:00 Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In this series, we’re discussing findings from DIAL’s Equal Lives Project, which looks at how inequality impacts the lives of young adults. Our guests in today's episode, are Equal Lives’ Principal Investigator Susan Harkness, and Aleja Rodríguez Sánchez. They've been looking at the gender division of housework during the COVID-19 pandemic, to see whether any changes are temporary or longer lasting. I started by asking Susan to explain the backdrop to the research. Susan Harkness  0:32  So this research fits into a larger body of research looking at how inequalities evolve over the lifecourse. And so when COVID came along, we realised it revealed that there are really important changes going on and new inequalities and growing inequalities we needed to think about so a part of that we're looking at what is happening within families, and in particular, how households divide their labour because that has implications for what happens in the labour market and what happens to broader inequalities. Christine Garrington  1:01  Aleja what exactly was it that you're hoping to get a better handle on, a better understanding of in all of this? Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez  1:09 Yeah, we started with the idea that maybe the effects of the pandemic and the lockdown on the division of labour were going to affect some people more than others. We intended to look at what couples would do differently if they had children or didn't have children. We also further wanted to look at whether the age of the child would make a difference in how the pandemic impacted the division of labour. But then we realised that there were a lot of things going on at the same time and it wasn't going to be easy to sort of look at one moment in time and before and after. And so we wanted to give it a more dynamic look and see how the situation evolved over time as these further changes in the furlough scheme, childcare and school closures were put in place and then lifted.  Christine Garrington  1:55  Can you talk us through exactly what it was that you that you did? Alejandra Rodríguez Sánchez  1:58  We opted for a very, first, very descriptive type of study, looking at the share of housework done by women, and here we look at the percentage or the proportion or the share that it's done by women of the total amount of number of hours spent on housework, cooking, cleaning, but does not include childcare in this case. So we want to know how that share of the work done by women changed. So we wanted to look at this quantity at different moments in the pandemic. We wanted to look at it first shock but then we also wanted to look at what happened after that first shock, whether those same things, the same effects would have stayed over time or were they, whether there would need some sort of change. And for that we use a technique called kernel density estimation, which helps us to see how the distribution of a variable in the population has shifted over time. So we wanted to first estimate pre-pandemic distribution and then we wanted to see how the distribution has shifted over time. Then secondly, we wanted to sort of further those descriptive analysis with a fixed effects type of regression, which basically we tried to compare couples to their o

In Episode 13 of Series 3 of the DIAL Podcast, Professor Nicky LeFeuvre from the University of Lausanne discusses findings from DIAL’s DAISIE project (Dynamics of Accumulated Inequalities for Seniors in Employment, which has been exploring the gendered impacts of policies aimed at extending working life.  Transcript Christine Garrington  0:00   Welcome to DIAL a podcast where we tune in to evidence on inequality over the life course. In series three we're discussing emerging findings from DIAL research. For this episode, we're talking to Nicky LeFeuvre from the University of Lausanne about findings from DIAL’s DAISIE project, which has been exploring the gendered impacts of policies aimed at extending working life. I started by asking her to talk about the policy backdrop to the research Nicky LeFeuvre  0:25   Over the last 10 or 12 years there has been this quite widespread consensus about the need to extend working lives and this consensus has existed at national levels, you know, government initiatives, also across international organisations like the OECD, and the dominant narrative has been based on kind of two or three basic assumptions this inevitability of increasing full pension age, to keep pace with life expectancy. Questions about the sustainability of our existing welfare systems, pension systems, and also a discourse around personal individual choice and personal responsibility. You know, this idea fielded by the OECD that people are increasingly free to construct their own biographies and so there has been this sort of focus on rewardingly later retirement or penalising early retirement in actual fact, and relatively little concern for the inherent, I would say dynamics of accumulated inequality that lie behind this policy objective. And so this was very much something that we wanted to address in the in the DAISIE project and of course, it was completely in line with the overall aims of the DIAL programme. And our sort of particular focus was to say okay, individuals are receiving this policy discourse which is relatively homogenous across the board, and what are they doing with it? Okay, how is this really impacting on their lives? And notably, how is this being interpreted and acted upon by their employers, by the occupations that they're in? And to what extent their past life experiences, particularly their employment histories, and the way that their past employment has been articulated with their care duties if they happen to be women? How is all this coming together to produce a, what we presume would be quite a varied experience of what extended working life actually means for individuals and for organisations, to be honest. Christine Garrington  2:28   Yeah, now that brings me very nicely on to my next question, actually, because in recent years, policymakers have really recognised the need, the importance of taking, you know what we talked about as a life course approach to this issue, something you've just hinted at, and, and this is something that really resonates with your research. Tell us why this is so important. Nicky LeFeuvre  2:45   I think there has been it's been slow to come, but it is there, I would say, perhaps emerging recognition that rather than full-fledged recognition at the moment of the need to avoid the accumulation of individual disadvantages over the life course in terms of extended working life and this is related to health issues. You know, we do not age equally, people are not as equally able to envisage extending their working lives and they're also not as equally motivated to do so. So that this recognition has come or is coming slowly. And in the most recent OECD document, for example, which is entitled working better with age, there is this idea that perhaps there has been too, too much of focus on these financial incentives. So making it you know, financially penalising people for leaving the labour market too early with the too being in speech ma