EXPERT HUB – REPORT: STRUCTURALLY UNSOUND

by: Inclusive Growth Contributor | on: 05.12.23 | in: Inclusive Growth, Poverty and Hardship

EXPLORING INEQUALITIES: IGNITING RESEARCH TO BETTER INFORM UK POLICY

By UCL’s Siobhan Morris, Oliver Patel, Clare Stainthorp and Olivia Stevenson

INTRODUCTION

Much has changed over the last decade in the UK. The combination of an unprecedented squeeze on wages, sustained austerity for public services, and a shrinking social security safety net has resulted in the year‑on‑year progress in household living standards enjoyed throughout so much of the prior 50 years grinding to a halt. The economic disillusionment and rise of in‑work poverty this has created has contributed to the sense of anger and division that has accompanied much of the debate around the UK’s exit from the EU, with individuals appearing to increasingly adopt a ‘them and us’ view of society.

Inequality then, has risen rapidly up the agenda over the last decade. But just what is meant by ‘inequality’ can vary considerably from person to person.

Much of the political debate revolves around the ‘vertical’ nature of inequality (whereby one individual, regardless of who they are, fares less well economically than their neighbour). This is a very important part of the story, but it is one that hasn’t shifted a great deal over the last decade – or indeed over the last quarter of a century. Income inequality – as measured by the Gini coefficient – surged in the 1980s, setting the UK out as something of an international outlier. Relatively unchanged since the early 1990s, it remains too high today. Potential policy answers to the persistent challenges are well rehearsed: different people can debate the precise means of achieving the best outcome for income inequality (or even what the best outcome is), but most accept that it rests on making use of the three key policy ‘levers’ of employment, pay and taxes/benefits.

However, this somewhat simplistic characterisation is complicated by the presence of additional ‘horizontal’ forms of inequality. These relate to inequalities that act at a group level – covering gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, trans status and class, for instance. Individuals are subject to extra layers of structural inequalities as a direct result of their membership of these groups. It’s why gender pay gaps and disability employment gaps persist, even when we control for factors such as education level. The implication is that it isn’t enough to focus on improving the rules of the game when the playing field itself is inherently uneven.

Such horizontal inequalities – and the way in which they feed into and compound vertical inequalities – are increasingly at the heart of the policy response. And there are clear signs of progress too. Focusing on economics, we can see that the gaps in employment rates recorded among black men and Pakistani/Bangladeshi men relative to white men have narrowed from 16 percentage points and 19 percentage points respectively in 1996–97, to 8 percentage points and 6 percentage points respectively in 2018.

Social progress is also evident, with the passing of same-sex marriage legislation (in July 2013 in England and Wales, and February 2014 in Scotland) marking a significant stride forward in tackling structural inequalities on the basis of sexual orientation.

Nevertheless, the barriers faced by these groups – and the gaps in outcome they lead to – remain too large. We must keep striving for more.

The opportunity to make more progress rests in part on political and social prioritisation and resource. But it is also depends on the quality of our evidence base, both in terms of articulating the problem statement and in understanding the effectiveness of different policy interventions. Certainly we have more information and knowledge at our disposal than ever before, and there is a plethora of experts – in academia, policy, business and the third sector – working on inequality issues. Yet key gaps in our understanding remain.

Understanding why these gaps exist and what we might do to fill them has been the focus of this project. Over the course of six expert roundtables and numerous interviews with leading experts, we have sought to understand what is holding the research and policy community back. The answer is, of course, complex. But, by undertaking such a detailed multi-discipline exploration of the issues at hand, we have uncovered new insights that we believe should be embedded in research and policy approaches.

We have also roamed frequently into debates about interventions that governments and others might consider developing in different parts of the policy sphere, but they are not the focus here. It was never the intention of this project to draw up specific policy recommendations that might ‘fix’ inequality. Rather, our work has focused deliberately on the technocratic: we have concentrated on working up a new way of approaching research and policymaking that better reflects the lived experience of inequality.

Above all else, we have highlighted the importance of better understanding the complex, interconnected nature of structural inequalities. In particular, we have built up a clear picture of how different aspects of inequality intersect and compound one another. Given the way in which efforts to address inequalities, both in research and policy, can all too often fall into silos, these intersections remain understudied for the moment. But they are clearly important.

Consider the data on employment gaps once more, for instance. Taking all members of the BAME population (i.e. not just men this time) together, the employment gap relative to the white population stood at 9 percentage points in 2018. Meanwhile, the gap recorded by those with a disability relative to those without stood at 31 percentage points. But the gap recorded between the black disabled and the white non-disabled group was 44 percentage points. That’s a significantly larger gap, and it is above what we’d expect even if we were to assume that this group faced a ‘double disadvantage’ that was the sum of the disadvantage experienced by the black population and by the disabled population. It is also worth noting that the employment gap between disabled BAME men and non-disabled white men narrowed by 12 per cent between 2008 and 2018 – a step in the right direction, but significantly less impressive than the 36 per cent narrowing of the gap experienced by non-disabled BAME men.

And it is not just the intersection of inequality that matters; the interaction of different areas of a person’s life also plays a key role in the outcomes they face. For example, the specifics of an individual’s housing can have significant ramifications for their education and employment opportunities and for their health outcomes. And vice versa. The nature of inequality – how it is experienced, how it builds, and how it persists – is driven by a multitude of characteristics that are unique to each individual. In this way, understanding (and in turn addressing) structural inequalities is made more difficult by the heterogeneity of experience. Inequalities vary from person to person, group to group, policy area to policy area, and place to place.

We have attempted to focus on exactly this. By failing to fully understand the lived experience of inequalities and the interconnected, intrinsic nature of structural disadvantage we are tying one hand behind our back when it comes to designing policy aimed at alleviating inequity. To devise appropriate, sophisticated and nuanced policy solutions it is imperative that we take a more rounded view.

But trying to simultaneously study everything is impractical. Indeed, it can be unhelpful. If we reject or turn our back on research that we don’t consider to be sufficiently nuanced, then we risk making perfection the enemy of the good.

So what approach should we take to research and policymaking in order to make better progress towards tackling structural inequalities without falling into the trap of consigning it all to the ‘too hard’ box? Over the course of this project we have uncovered five key lessons – which we cover in turn in each of the chapters that follows. These lessons reflect those insights that came up time and again when looking across different forms of inequality and different policy areas in isolation. They build on the best practice we have identified, and help to plug the evidence gaps we have heard still remain. Perhaps most importantly, they also aim to better connect research to policy – developing a more joined-up approach that ensures we are tackling the right questions and giving ourselves the best chance of getting to the right answers.

Alongside this effort to enrich our understanding of the nature of structural inequalities, we are clear also that the case for equality still needs to be reinforced. While policies and legislation can be the bedrock of efforts designed to tackle structural inequalities, public support and societal attitudes also need to be transformed to affect wider change, alleviate embedded structural barriers, and influence everyday experience of disadvantage.

It is the role of governments and policymakers to proactively intervene to require organisations to promote equality and to tackle those structural barriers that persist. But they can’t do it alone. We all have a responsibility to act to create a more equal society.

Definition of terms

This report has adopted the term ‘structural inequalities’ to mean two core components: persistence and intersectionality. Persistence refers to inequalities that are continually reinforced and compounded over time, both intergenerationally and throughout an individual life-course, as a result of certain social structures and institutions. Intersectionality considers the relationships between inequalities and the cumulative effects of experiencing varying combinations of inequality. In this way, intersectionality recognises that inequality is fundamentally different for each individual and that certain groups in UK society face greater inequalities with increased persistence, and these differences can be explained by specific social structures and institutions.

Engaging with this report

To understand the complex nature of structural inequality (and how best to devise approaches to address it), it is imperative to consider issues through cross-cutting themes and methodological approaches rather than on the basis of a disciplinary topic or single protected characteristic. This report is therefore structured around five themes (language, opportunity, understanding evidence, voice and place), which prompt five associated ‘lessons’. Contained in the appendix, are deeper dives into the four thematic policy areas discussed over the course of our roundtables.

You can access the full report here:

Structurally-Unsound—Report.pdf