Het coronavirus zou niet discrimineren volgens Bert Wagendorp. Deze aanname klopt hoogstwaarschijnlijk niet. Een sluitend antwoord op de vraag of het coronavirus discrimineert op basis van bijvoorbeeld gender laat op zich wachten: volgens onderzoekers in The Lancet ontbreekt tot nu onderzoek naar pandemieën en genderverschillen. Desalniettemin lijkt het coronavirus wel degelijk te discrimineren: sociaaleconomische verschillen en genderverschillen op basis van blootstelling liggen op de loer.

Onderliggende sociaaleconomische verschillen kunnen leiden tot sociaaleconomisch onderscheid in blootstellingskansen. Jezelf beschermen tegen blootstelling gaat een stuk makkelijker als je een vaste baan hebt, of een goed gevulde bankrekening (denk aan het thuis laten bezorgen van pakketten of boodschappen). Voor de mensen die al moeilijk de eindjes aan elkaar konden knopen, is thuiswerken vaak geen optie en meerdere dagen werk missen ook niet. Hierdoor lopen zij een veel groter risico om blootgesteld te worden. Niet voor niets zien we overal ter wereld – van New York tot Stockholm tot Johannesburg – dat arme wijken het centrum van coronabesmettingen vormen.

Blootstellingskansen kunnen ook hoger liggen voor vrouwen, bijvoorbeeld doordat vrouwen oververtegenwoordigd zijn in de sector die nu het hardst werkt om ons in leven te houden, de gezondheidszorg. Zij stellen zich dagelijks bloot aan mensen die besmet zijn. Voor bepaalde beroepsgroepen in de gezondheidszorg waar vrouwen ook sterk oververtegenwoordigd zijn, zoals de thuiszorg, is de situatie zelfs schrijnend te noemen. Er is nu al onvoldoende beschermingsmateriaal voor al het personeel. Dit zijn vaak dezelfde thuiszorgorganisaties die de laatste jaren steeds meer moesten doen met beperkte middelen door stevige overheidsbezuinigingen.

En dat is misschien wel het pijnlijkst aan het coronavirus: de discriminatie van het virus hebben we als maatschappij over onszelf afgeroepen. Hoewel de regering nu ongekende en zeer noodzakelijke maatregelen neemt om zowel de medische als de economische gevolgen van de coronapandemie te dempen, is zij ook medeverantwoordelijk voor de jarenlange uitholling van de publieke sector, de afwenteling van arbeidsrisico’s op werknemers, de onzekerheid op de arbeidsmarkt, de groei van het aantal onvrijwillige zzp’ers, en het afschuiven van zorgtaken op mantelzorg (wederom voor het overgrote deel door vrouwen gegeven). Allemaal factoren die de blootstellingskansen voor lagere sociaaleconomische klassen en vrouwen vergroten.

Wie net als Bert Wagendorp beweert dat het virus niet discrimineert, sluit de ogen voor de maatschappelijke scheidslijnen die het virus blootlegt. We hebben onze samenleving zelf zo ingericht dat sociaaleconomische klasse en gender bepalen wie de grootste kans heeft om aan het virus blootgesteld te worden.

Mara A. Yerkes is Universitair Hoofddocent in Interdisciplinaire Sociale Wetenschap (Universiteit Utrecht) met expertise op het terrein van sociaal beleid en sociale ongelijkheid.

Rense Nieuwenhuis is Associate Professor in de sociologie bij het Zweeds instituut voor sociaal-wetenschappelijk onderzoek (SOFI) aan de Universiteit van Stockholm. Hij doet onderzoek op het gebied van sociaal-economische ongelijkheid, gezinnen, en sociaal beleid.

Personally, I think doing a good PhD means:

Doing a PhD represents several years of supervised training, developing oneself to become a researcher capable of independently contributing to, and participating in, a scientific discipline.

Contributing to a scientific discipline means that a PhD candidate is supervised to create scientific products of the highest possible quality, and does so in an increasingly independent manner. Participating in a scientific discipline entails presenting these scientific products to others, frequently discussing these with colleagues, and collaborating with representatives of that discipline.

The core of that statement is being trained to independently contributing to a scientific discipline.

Based on my (clearly limited and selective) experiences, I learned that in New York (US?) PhD students really are … students. This by no means is a negative comments, but it is clear that the PhDs I met have a different set of skills. Generally, my impression is that their course load results in them being familiar with a wide overview of the literature on several topics, but (at least during the first few years) are less experienced in doing research with some level of independence. It’s a trade-off: some of the exams seem to be gruesome, with students faced with the taks of familiarizing themselves with a whole field of research. This is well beyond the relatively simple exams we have in the Netherlands, but getting your hands ‘in the dirt’ while doing some actual research yourself also is quite the experience.

Also, I noticed that it is much more of a struggle to do your PhD in the US. In New York life is expensive, and most PhDs are not employed by their universities as in the Netherlands. This means you have to find yourself some funding, but also that it really is a disappointment if your proposal is rejected. Not getting those funds really means you have to rethink your options. Many PhDs also need to have a job – besides writing their thesis, that is. Many teach or assist a professor, tasks that we do in the Netherlands as well. The difference, I think, is that the workload (again, besides writing a thesis which is a pretty decent workload by itself) is much higher in the US.

If every individual is under quite a lot of pressure, I wonder how that works out in terms of being able to form an academic group. I learned of one example of a PhD only providing to help to others when being paid on an hourly rate. I understand where that’s coming from, but also wonder how it affects the livelihood of an academic community of shared ideas, discussion, and collective interest.

The premise of my project was something that is commonly believed amongst sociologists – and something I took for granted for many years. I even remember when I first learned about it during a first-year course on inequality. Simply put: because spouses’ earnings are positively correlated, the earnings inequality between households is thought to be bigger than the earnings inequality between individuals. Intuitively, this makes sense: it is easy to imagine how the earnings gap between households with two top-earners and households with two low-income spouses is quite big. Recently, a new book by Esping-Andersen (The incomplete revolution) is getting quite some attention, and is reporting on how increased women’s earnings have contributed to income inequalities between households in several countries.

I thought it would be very interesting to delve into this issue more, and try to analyze differences between countries in the degree to which women’s earnings affects the inequality between households in these countries. Interestingly, though, once I started working seriously on the project, it quickly became clear that women’s earnings attenuate – rather than increase – inequalities between households. Virtually all authors analyzing the contribution of women’s earnings to household inequalities report this attenuating affect, and do so for various countries and for different points in time. So, the common conception that women’s earnings generally increase inequalities, turned out to be a misconception. No need to be concerned of this unintended consequence of women’s increased labour force participation.

So, I had to revise my plan. I turned my attention to a systematic review of the literature with a special focus on how it is possible that spouses’ earnings are positively correlated (which, indeed, they are), but that when women’s earnings are high the inequalities between households tend to be reduced. I won’t spoil the anticipation by disclosing my results here (but please, do contact me if you want to be informed when these results become available), but I figured it out. Also, I am still working on a systematic analysis comparing countries with very interesting preliminary results (again, no spoilers).

This concludes the most technical part of this series of blogs on my New York experiences. Tomorrow some notes on how PhD students are trained in New York.

As said, the main reason I was in New York was to do research. Since my thesis is about the effectiveness of family policies, I wanted to work with an expert on this topic. It is difficult to think of someone who is more knowledgeable on this topic, and more experienced in doing high quality empirical studies, than prof. Janet Gornick. I was very enthusiastic that she agreed with me visiting her in New York for a couple of months, and that she was willing to supervise me, as well as to co-author a paper. Moreover, Janet Gornick is also the director of LIS (formerly known as the Luxembourg Income Studies).

LIS is a cross-national data center, located in Luxembourg.
LIS is home to the Luxembourg Income Study Database and the Luxembourg Wealth Study Database. These databases contain harmonised microdata from high- and middle-income countries around the world.

Their mission is to

… to enable, facilitate, promote, and conduct cross-national comparative research on socio-economic outcomes and on the institutional factors that shape those outcomes.

Basically, this means that the LIS is a remarkably valuable source of data for my thesis, which is inherently country-comparative in design. And, indeed, the LIS proved to be a very detailed, well documented, and very carefully harmonized source of data. To work with these data, together with the director of LIS, was an inspiring experience. Moreover, the graduate center of the City University of New York (CUNY) invited me over as an Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) Fellow, which was a great honor.

Appropriately, I started my day with a session on using social media. Nanette Fondas (amongst many other things a blogger at huffingtonpost.com) explained why intellectuals shold blog. The world has changed, with scholars increasingly trying to get their work out to the larger public. For academics blogging means more work. But, for greater dissemination, they have no choice but to participate. CV Harquail (Entrepreneur of insights, blogger at AuthenticOrganizations.com) explained how blogging is much more about influence and opinion than it is about presenting facts in academese language.

Next, a poster session. Admittedly, I found the posters a bit too much focused on text: as if a whole are article was copy-pasted on a big piece of paper. Nevertheless, interesting stuff! Audrey Reichman was interested in the association between maternal feelings towards employment and maternal mental health and well-being. Whereas the results were quite difficult to interpret, we had a nice discussion about interpretations of the findings, and possible improvements of the research. Christina Wolf showed analyses on time use of both men and women, in the United States and Germany. Men clearly spend more time on leisure than women. But, did you know that married men have less leisure time than cohabiting men? I wasn’t really aware of the existence of such differences between cohabitation and marriage, but the found disparities in time use were consistent between countries. In the general discussion, I could even contribute some insights on Dutch part-time labour. Since so many women indeed work part-time in the Netherlands, many women who actually want to work full-time find themselves faced with all kind of normative and practical pressures.

There was a great round-table conversation, about an international perspective on work and ‘families': addressing needs and solutions in diverse societies. The goal was to debate international applications of theoretical frameworks, measures, and interventions relating to the work/nonwork issues. The notes on this session will be posted on the WFRN commons soon, so make sure to check them out. Some of the issues discussed include how job demands – a crucial indicator of work-family balance – are highly job-specific, Gail Kinman argued, and therefore difficult to assess with general measures. Anne Bardoel discussed the difficulties multinationals face when trying to develop HR policies to apply in different countries. Total diversity is not feasible, but a single policy would not be applicable in all countries / cultures. Even within countries, great diversity is present. India, Tripti Desai described, is much more like Europe than a single country. Finally, despite all these forms of diversity in jobs, cultures, countries, and regions, Jospeh Grzywacz argued for the importance of looking for a common ground in our measures to attempt and facilitate comparative research.

So, we have had three fantastic days at the WFRN inaugural meeting in New York. Of course, I haven’t even told about a plenary meeting on Workplace Flexibility in the United States, nor about managing the work-family boundary, nor about supporting fatherhood and paid work. There simply was too much to attend, and to choose between. What a great program it was, and the number of very nice people I met!

In the end, I am delighted to have been part of the start of what seems to be a very interesting organization.

Did you attend this conference as well? Drop a comment with your thoughts on the WFRN inaugural meeting!