Differences in type of university, degree choice, prior attainment and institutional racism are all possible explanations.
In 2020/21 85.9% of white students were awarded a first or 2:1 degree compared to only 67.4% of black students.
This means there is an 18.5% attainment gap between black and white students at university level.
There is also a smaller attainment gap between all BAME students and white students, of 8.9%, but the most significant gap is between white and black students.
Why are black students less likely to get firsts?
Possible explanations include:
They are less likely to attend Russel Group universities
They are less likely to subjects with higher rates of first class degree awarded
They have lower prior A-level attainment
Institutional Racism.
Russel Group Universities and Ethnicity
It could be that black students are less likely to go to Russel Group universities which get better results, but this is not the case: equal numbers of black and white students attend Russel Group Universities.
Does subject choice make a difference?
There is a significant difference in class of degree awarded by subject and it might be the case that black students are less likely to study subjects which have a high rate of first class degrees awarded.
Below are the degree subjects which are most likely to be awarded a first: Almost 43% of medicine and dentistry degrees get a first compared to only 17% of law degrees, which is a huge difference (3).
If black students are more likely to do subjects like law and less likely to do subjects like medicine this could explain why they are also less likely to get first class degrees.
However, while it is true that black students are more likely to do Law than veterinary sciences, according to Universities UK (4) the differences in attainment by ethnicity within these subjects.
A level grades
It could be that black students go into university with lower A-level results which are correlated with lower level degree results.
However, black students underachieve compared to white students no matter what prior attainment they have as the chart (5) below shows.
Could it be institutional racism?
This is the explanation favoured by Universities UK (4) who use the term ‘ degree awarding gap’ rather than ‘degree attainment gap’ in their reports to reflect the fact that the gap is caused by institutional racism or inaction, rather than individual BAME students.
They conducted research in 2019, followed up in 2022 using a range of quantitative analysis and more qualitative interviews to research the experiences of BAME students.
The main piece of quantitative evidence to back up the theory that universities are institutionally racist is the underrepresentation of black staff members, with only 2.5% of university staff being black.
In a recent Guardian article (2) one graduate claims that black students are not listened to by universities, saying that she was warned that she would find it difficult if she did a PhD as a black female students because of racism, effectively being put off from pursing this career path.
More broadly the article suggests that black students do not feel at home in university and so are less likely to strive for higher level degrees.
Signposting
This material is primarily relevant to the education module within A-level sociology.
Women are underrepresented in medical research and this forms the basis of gender inequalities in health care.
Medical systems discriminate against women, leaving them misunderstood, mistreated and misdiagnosed.
There are biological sex differences in every organ and system of the body that mean there are significant sex differences in the health issues men and women face, the causes of their different health problems and the effectiveness of the treatments we might use to tackle these problems.
But these differences have been ignored in medical education, research and diagnoses on the front line meaning that countless women have suffered and died unnecessarily because of gender-data gaps all the way through the medical profession.
This is according to Caroline Criado Perez (2019) in ‘Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in World Designed for Men’, and below I summarise her chapter on gender bias in the medical professions.
Gender bias in medical education
Medical education is focused on ‘the male norm’ such that there is a male-default bias, with women in general being seen as abnormal.
This bias against women goes back to the Ancient Greeks: Aristotle saw the female body as a mutilated male body, the female was viewed as the male turned outside in and Ovaries were female testicle, not given their own name until the seventeenth century.
Representation of the male body as the norm persists in modern medical textbooks: A 2008 analysis of over 16000 textbooks revealed that the male body was used three times more than the female body to represent ‘neutral’ body parts; and the results of clinical trials were written up as relevant to both men and women even when women had been excluded from the trials.
Gender data gaps also exist in curricula, with gender related health issues rarely taught in medical degrees, and where they are, there are only a few courses in a few universities.
Health differences between men and women
There are significant biological differences between male and female bodies
There are sex differences in lung capacity such that women who smoke the same number of cigarettes to men are between 20-70% more likely to develop lung cancer.
Women are three times more likely than men to develop Autoimmune diseases, they make up 80% of those with these diseases.
There are sex differences in our cells and our proteins, in biological markers for autism and significant differences in how males and females respond to stress.
Research on heart attacks which focus mainly on men have found that chances of survival are higher if someone has a heart attack during the day, this is reliable research which has been repeated many times. However a 2016 study found a lower chance of survival for daytime heart attacks – the difference being that this study was done on female (mice).
Research bias in health studies
Women have largely been excluded from medical research.
Since the landmark discovery of the Y chromosome in 1990 as the ‘sex determining region’, most research has focused on testes development, it is only since 2010 that we started researching the active process of ovarian determination.
In 31 landmark trials of congestive heart failure between 1987 and 2012 females made up only 25% of participants.
Women make up 55% of people who are HIV positive in the developing world and yet less than 40% of people in vaccination studies were women and less than 20% were women in studies aiming to find a cure.
Pregnant women are routinely excluded from clinical trials to the extent that we lack solid data on how to treat them for practically anything. For example during the 2002-4 SARS outbreak in China pregnant women’s health outcomes were not systematically tracked, thus we have no information on how to treat them come the next pandemic.
Women are 70% more likely to suffer depression than men but animal studies on brain disorders are five times more likely to be done on male animals.
When female viagra was found to react negatively with alcohol in 2015 the manufacturer decided to run a trial – on 23 men and two women, and they did not sex-disaggregate their findings.
A 2001 audit of FDA records found that a third of documents didn’t sex-disaggregate their data and 40% didn’t even specify the sex of the respondents.
A 2014 op-ed in the journal Scientific American complained that including both men and women in experiments was a waste of resources.
The lack of sex-specific data prevents us from giving appropriate advice to women.
For example in 2011 the World Cancer Fund complained that only 50% of studies into the impact of diet on cancer specified differences between men and women so it is difficult to give sex-specific guidance for diets for women to reduce cancer risks.
CRT-D devices are used to correct delays in electrical signals in the heart. The frequency these are set to matters, they can save lives, and for men the correct frequency is 150 milliseconds, the default setting for both men and women. However when you sex-disaggregate the data you find that a setting of 130-149 MS reduced female deaths by 76%.
Even something as basic as advice on exercise is gender biased against women: trials have found that resistance training is bad if you have high blood pressure, again the standard advice for both sexes, but more recent research has found that it might actually benefit women with high blood pressure.
Conclusions
Women have been dying in greater numbers than they have to be, especially because they ingest 80% of pharmaceuticals in the U.S.
The whole of the medical profession is complicit in this and things need to change to save women’s lives!
Signposting and Sources
This material shows us that there are gender biases in healthcare, based on gender biases in medical research, and it reminds us of the continued importance of Feminism today.
Source: Caroline Criado Perez (2019) Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in World Designed for Men.
Millions of UK homeowners face huge increases to their mortgage repayments as interest rates continue to increase (1)
According to the Office for National Statistics, the average monthly repayment for a mortgage on a semi-detached house in the UK rose 61% to year ending December 2022.
This increase will be even greater now… the news over the last week has focused on how another 2 million people are coming off lower fixed rate mortgage deals between now and 2024, meaning their interest rates are going to increase from around 2% to 6%.
I’m one of these people, my current 2% rate ends in September this year, and I’ll have to switch onto a higher rate, which with my current provider is 6% or 5% on a two year fixed deal. I might of course switch, but that gives me a bench mark, I don’t imagine I’ll get much better than that.
Thankfully my current mortgage is so low that it’s not a big deal for me to manage the increase in repayments In fact if I just extend the mortgage by a few months I can keep my repayments level, which for me means pushing it back from 5 years of repayments to around 5 years and 3 months.
However, obviously I’d rather pay less than more over the next five years or so and it’s difficult to make a judgement as to whether I’m better of fixing now at say 5% for three years, or slightly higher at 5.5% for the full five years, or just going onto the 6% variable rate.
Obviously fixing for a longer period is the strategy IF interest rates are going to go up, while going on the variable rate is best IF interests rates are going to come down.
The problem is I don’t know what’s going to happen to interest rates, but it’s 100% on me to make a decision and 100% on me to bear the consequences of paying more in mortgage interest if I make the wrong the decision.
What’s causing inflation?
The bank of England keeps putting interest rates up because of high inflation, inflation being the rising cost of living.
The government put this down to a squeeze of food and energy because of the legacy of covid and the war in Ukraine putting a squeeze on supply chains, and all of this hasn’t been helped be Brexit making it more difficult to trade with the EU.
Personally I also think there’s a longer term trend of the rise in middle class consumers in countries such as India and China, which will increase demand for all goods and services
neoliberalism is also a problem – as increasing inequality means more wealth sits in tax havens not being used for innovation and more money gets sucked upwards, increasing inequality meaning a higher proportion of our resources go on meat and yachts for rich, which also pushes up prices.
Finally, the UK government has been printing money for years in response to various crises, which reduces the value of the pound. It’s printed almost £1 trillion since 2009 in Quantitative Easing Measures.
In short, there is no obvious immediate end to this inflation crisis because all of the causes are outside of the Government’s control, and many of its responses to global forces over the last decade have made matters worse.
Individualised solutions to Structural Problems (Again)
As to the solutions to the current mortgage crises, all that the current super-rich PrimeMinister Rishi Sunak has is to suggest people should ‘hold their nerve on interest rates‘.
In short, ‘just suck it up’, you’re on your own, deal with it, folks.
Signposting and Sources
This post is really just a general reminder of how damaging neoliberal economic policies are to ordinary people in the long run.
Why are so many U.K. students being awarded first-class degrees?
Almost 38% of U.K. students were awarded first-class honours degrees in 2021, compared to only 15.7% in 2011.
Some of this increase is due to universities awarding more generous degrees during the Covid-19 Pandemic, which mirrors what happened with the over-grading at GCSE and A-level:
However, we can also see from the above chart that this grade inflation has been increasingly steadily nearly every year since 2010-11.
According to REFORM (2) there is also a longer term trend in degree level grade-inflation: In the mid 1990s only 7% of degrees were awarded a first-class honours.
Why are more students being awarded first-class degrees?
It is highly unlikely that the type of students who enter university today are twice as capable of achieving a first-class degree than those students who entered university a decade ago.
Or put another way there aren’t twice as many super-intelligent or super-degree-exam trained students today compared to back in 2013.
Some recent statistical analysis (1) by the Office for Students backs this up: they found that over half of the increase in degree-grades cannot be accounted for by factors such as changes in provider, geographical area, subject, entry qualifications, age, disability, ethnicity, or sex.
Why is there grade-inflation?
Three possible reasons include:
Universities are grading more leniently.
Universities are trying to close the achievement gap
The pressures of marketisation?
Universities grade more leniently today
Analysis by REFORM (2) suggests that universities are getting more lenient in awarding grades. In other words, they are awarding higher grades for lower standards of work.
This is (according to REFORM) happening in two ways:
Universities have changed the algorithms they use to translate raw marks into degree grades, one specific change mentioned is that they are now more lenient towards borderline students: if you’ve got 68% overall you’re now more likely to be tipped over into a first-class honours degree than you would have been ten years ago.
University staff have also come under pressure to mark more leniently, with several staff publicly complaining over the years about the lowering of standards.
Closing the achievement gap
Maybe one upside of grade inflation is that we find that students with worse A-levels are gradually achieving BETTER grades of degrees over time. For example, in 2011 only 40% of students who achieved three Ds at A-level achieved a first or 2.1 degree, by 2021 this figure was 80%.
This is in part how universities justify grade inflation: that it helps them close their disadvantage gap, as it tends to be students from lower income backgrounds who enter with worse A-levels, and we can see from the above chart that the achievement gap has narrowed over time.
The pressures of marketisation?
Students now pay £9000 a year in tuition fees, they didn’t in the mid 1990s.
This may help explain why 38% of students now get firsts compared to only 7% in the mid 1990s.
This could be because of either or both students working harder because they are paying or universities gradually shifting to give students what they are paying for, which is a decent degree at the end of the day!
The problems with grade inflation
While individual students who get a first class degree may feel best-chuffed, when 38% of them are getting the same, the degree is worth less: so many students now get them it is almost like just a standard degree and there is more competition going into the labour market.
And there are question marks over the validity of today’s degrees. If I was en employer and had two candidates for a job: a 2022 graduate with a first-class degree and a 2012 graduate with a 2.1, I would be thinking those degrees are really the same class, just graded at different standards.
In global terms grade inflation reduces the credibility of UK Higher Education market.
Signposting and related posts
This material is relevant to the education module, although not necessarily of direct relevance to A-level sociology this should be of interest to recent graduates: if you have a first-class degree then your prospective employers may well be suspicious of its validity, so don’t rest on your laurels!
Global culture is where large numbers of people in different countries across the world share common norms, values and tastes, and is one aspect of globalisation. Those sociologists who believe that a global culture exists tend to see it as an ongoing process with more and more people around increasingly sharing similar world views and developing a global consciousness.
Global culture is a contested concept: there are several different perspectives on the nature and extent of global culture and disagreements over whether such a thing exists in any meaningful sense at all!
This post considers two theories of global culture:
Lechner and Boli (2005) who argue that global institutions are laying the foundations for what they call a ‘world culture’
John Storey (2003) who argues that Time-Space Compression (following David Harvey) has resulted in more cultural mixing and hybridity around the world, so we have a plurality of cultures rather than one global culture.
You might like to read this post in conjunction with my other related post on cultural globalisation which looks at aspects of cultural globalisation in more depth, looking at different aspects of cultural globalisastion one by one (such as consumption patterns, shared values etc.) as we as concepts such as detraditionalisation and the risk society.
That post is really the overview of the topic, this post offers a little more theoretical depth, focusing in on two actual theorists.
World Culture, institutions and organisations
Frank J. Lechner and John Boli (2005) use the term ‘world culture‘ rather than ‘global culture’ and argue that globalisation has resulted in a world culture that is here to stay, it cannot be undone though its content may change and it may increase or decrease in influence.
Lechner and Boli’s conception of culture is one of socially constructed and socially shared symbolism, so they see it as being about ideas and meanings rather than tangible material objects.
World culture develops through global values, becoming institutionalised through a process of structuration. Actors within global institutions establish typical patterns of behaviour and values and these eventually become institutionalised, and adopted by more and more people globally, who in turn ‘enact’ these behaviours thus further reinforcing them.
Examples of world culture
Two examples of world culture are education and chess.
Many education systems in different countries have similar institutional norms surrounding formal education such as having around 11-13 years of age-grouped teaching, curricula which clearly outline what is to be studied, well-structured examination systems leading to qualifications, and similar hierarchies of organisation within schools.
There are also and codes of conduct outlining expected patterns of behaviour and attendance from students, and a clear code of professional practice for teachers, which are very similar in many countries.
Throughout the world local chess clubs follow the rules of the World Chess Federation, and players look up to and seek to learn from international grand masters whose achievements are recognised all over the world.
There are also a set of norms about how to play chess, not just the rules, but norms to do with demeanour, how to communicate, and how to approach more senior players.
Lechner and Boli accept the fact that there isn’t total homogenisation of the way education and chess are enacted locally, there are local variations, but increasing similarities too.
There are also institutions whose purpose is to explicitly promote world culture such as:
The United Nations (UN) which overseas the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The International Criminal Court (ICC) which is responsible for bringing to trial people who have committed crimes against humanity
The Olympic Movement which promotes fair play in several world sports.
Lechner and Boli accept the fact that there are examples of movements against global culture, such as the way Islam has manifested itself in Afghanistan or Iran, but at the same time there are people in both countries who argue for less extremist Islamic State policies and identify more with the global community.
Lechner and Boli argue that much of the apparent local diversity we see is just superficial, about clothing and food, rather than about deeper shared meanings and values where there is more global consensus.
Evaluations
While Lechner and Boli do identify some definite trends towards global culture they possibly overstate the extent to which we have an established global system of shared values and meaning.
The example of chess is especially weak as there simply aren’t that many chess players, and while education systems around the world have similarities the experience of education varies massively depending on whether you are a pupil in Britain or Somalia or Afghanistan, especially a girl in the later country.
There is a lot of difference and conflict and people just ignoring ‘universal global values’ that isn’t sufficiently taken into account.
John Storey: global culture
Storey (2003) argues that in the past, cultures around the world were generally separated from each other through space and time. In the 19th century, for example, it simply took too much time and money for people to travel across the globe and so there was relatively little intermixing of cultures.
Today however, the world is much smaller thanks to time-space compression. The main engine of this is the media which makes it possible for cultures in different parts of the world to influence each other instantaneously.
Global travel is also much faster which makes it possible for global cultures to develop. Global cultural events such as the World Cup and the Olympics can happen because it is relatively easy for teams and supporters to travel to one place , and the existence of these events create a global cultural legacy that endures.
Heterogenisation
Storey rejects the theory that cultural globalisation is simply a process of Americanisation. He argues that culture is much more than the products people buy, and that there are considerable variations around the global in how people use the same products and values they attach to them.
There are many examples of American products being adapted to fit into local cultural styles, such as with regional variations on McDonald’s food.
Hybridisation
Globalisation offers the possibility of cultural mixing on a scale never known before.
It has not undermine local culture nor does it lead to a single global culture. An ever greater plurality of hybrid-cultures: where global influences mix with local cultures and produce something new: a mixture (hybrid) between the global and the local, as with the example of Chicken Tika Masala.
One consequence of this is that folk culture is undermined, because even the oldest and most isolated traditions are changed by global influences.
Evaluations
Storey seems to paint a more accurate picture of the hybrid and complex nature of ‘global culture’ than Lechner and Boli, it seems accurate to accept the fact that there is no meaningful overarching global culture, rather pluralities and hybrids.
However Leslie Sklaire argues that he fails to recognize that not all cultures in the world are valued equally. There are maybe more powerful and dominant cultures which can disrupt local cultures against people’s will, such as consumer culture linked to brands pushed by Transnational Corporations.
mothers are more likely to take time off work and do 10 hours more housework and childcare than fathers.
One of way of measuring the relative effects of motherhood and fatherhood on paid and domestic labour is to compare the following two subsets:
Mothers in relation to women without dependent children compared to
Fathers in relation to men without dependent children.
Comparing these two subsets would be a useful contribution to evaluating Liberal and Radical Feminist theories about how family life affects women. Broadly speaking:
Liberal Feminists claim that family life (compared to women remaining childless) has little or no negative impact on women.
Radical Feminists claim that family life has a negative impact on women, as women are more likely to quit their jobs when children are born, and they end up doing more childcare than men, and continue to do more housework too, suffering from the triple shift.
Generally speaking if mothers are doing less paid work and more domestic work than women without dependent children, while fathers are doing more paid work and less domestic work than men without dependent children, it’s reasonable to say this suggests more support for radical compared to liberal feminism.
HOWEVER, we’d still need to do further research to test this out: statistics don’t give us in-depth data and allow us to conclusively prove or dismiss either of these broad theoretical positions, they just point in one direction or the other.
This post looks at the following data taken from the ONS’ (1)
The percentages of mothers, fathers and men and women without dependent children in employment
The percentage of mothers in full time work by age of child
The percentages of 24-35 year old mothers and fathers in work.
How much housework mothers and fathers do.
You can view all of the stats below on my Tableau page.
Motherhood and fatherhood encourage traditional gender roles
The graphic below shows the percentages of mothers, fathers and men/ women without dependent children in paid employment 2002-21, U.K.
In 2021 72% of men without dependent children were in work compared to 92% of fathers. 69% of women were in work compared to 76% of mothers.
So… both men and women with children are more likely to be in work compared to those without children (but this data also includes retired people, so no surprise, maybe!)
What’s interesting is the relative difference between men and women without children and mothers and fathers:
Mothers are much less likely to be work than fathers, the figures for men and women without children in work are much closer together.
This suggests having children is more likely to result in women leaving paid employment to take on a caring role while having children encourages men into the breadwinner role.
Only 30% of women with new born children work full-time
It’s probably unsurprising, but only 30% of women with very young children aged one, and the percentage increases gradually until 49% of women with 18 year olds are in paid employment.
This is a clear trend of women taken a period of employment and then gradually returning in greater numbers as their children get older.
The figures for men hardly change at all with children being born (not shown on graphic).
Young women are affected most
This statistic is the strongest evidence of how motherhood has a detrimental affect on women’s careers compared to fatherhood.
For 24-35 year olds, MORE women without dependent children are in paid work than men.
However, only 69% of 24-35 year old mothers are in employment compared to a massive 92% of fathers in the same age category.
Women do more housework and childcare
In 2022 women did 30 minutes more unpaid housework per day than men and they did one hour extra of childcare.
Over the course of a week, this means women with dependent children are doing 10 hours more childcare and housework combined than men.
This seems to be strong evidence of mothers suffering from the triple shift.
Conclusions: support for radical feminism?
The above statistical evidence seems to offer some support for the radical feminist view that families are harmful to women, in that having children results in women being more likely to take time off paid-work compared to men and mothers doing 10 hours more domestic labour and childcare per week than men.
Sources and Signposting
This material is most relevant to the families and households module, usually taught as part of the first year A-level sociology course.
youth transitions in postmodern society are full of uncertain choices and constrained by government policy and social class.
The transition from youth to adulthood in modern Britain is a very gradual one, spanning a period from 15-24 years of age if we take the United Nations definition of youth and longer in some cases.
This gradual transition isn’t natural, it is a consequence of structural changes associated with the shift to postmodern society and government policies which have largely been a reaction to these societal level changes.
There are three main transitions associated with moving from youth to adulthood (following Furlong and Cartmel, 2006):
The transition from school to work: from compulsory GCSEs through further and possibly higher education or training to full time paid employment.
The domestic transition away from one’s parental family to establishing a primary relationship with one’s own intimate partner
The housing transition which involves moving from the family home with parents to living alone or with a partner.
The period of youth involves a lot more than just these three transitions, it is also a time when one ‘grows into’ or finds one’s own independent self-identity.
Transitions to adulthood involve young people in making more choices today than ever, but these are not necessarily entirely free choices for every individual: social class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and locality can all limit opportunities and make certain transitional choices for some impractical, undesirable or just impossible.
(For example if you fail your GCSES, you probably aren’t going to be able to choose to become a medical doctor!)
Structural changes affecting youth transitions
Economic globalisation since the 1970s have resulted in significant changes in the labour market in the UK. Cheaper labour costs abroad have resulted in manufacturing moving to countries such as China and India and meant a decline in the number of factory based jobs for life which many working class youth could have expected to go into.
Instead of jobs for life young people today are facing the prospect of being portfolio workers, and can expect to change jobs many times throughout their working lives, and this is especially true early on in their careers. There are also many more informal gig economy jobs in the service sector which are often filed by young people.
As a result the experience of work today is a lot more fragmented and a lot more uncertain than it used to be.
Cultural globalisation has meant a huge increase in both the amount of knowledge, information and leisure products purely for entertainment and the consequences of this are that young people have to make choices about what knowledge and products to consume.
In education this means relying on advice to make choices at 16, 18 and 21 if you pursue the ‘standard’ school, further education, then higher education route, but even that is a choice, alongside vocational options such as apprenticeships.
Outside of education there is a fantastic array of leisure options available… music, style, travel, who to watch and follow on instagram, gaming, sports, so many options to shape one’s identity and also possible routes to making money if you position yourself well.
The cost of housing in the UK is also a factor, not helped by the recent cost of living crisis and increase in interest rates: this makes the prospect of living at home with one’s parents a financial necessity for many which can shape the experience of youth.
Finally there is the continuous reality of global crises: if it’s not a financial crisis (2008, 2022-23) it’s a pandemic, if it’s not a pandemic, it’s a war or wars, and even without any of these we’ve got an ongoing environmental crisis, and on top of this a political elite in Britain that seems incapable of managing these problems.
All of these structural changes mean that young people today face a lot of more uncertainty but also a lot more choice, and (following Giddens) they have to be a lot more reflexive: finding one’s way in the transition from youth to adulthood involves a lot of reflection, constructing one’s identity becomes a constant project which requires constant effort.
Society also becomes a lot more individualised. Experts (for example careers advisors) and ‘self proclaimed not really experts’ on YouTube may well offer advice but it’s on the individual to make their own choices in life. There are no clear, objective right decisions that anyone can make, individuals have to decide what is right for them, and this means we are operating under conditions of risk and uncertainty (following Ulrich Beck).
In the postmodern transition from youth to adulthood you are free (within reason) to choose your life course and identity, but you also have to accept the consequences of bad decisions that you make: that’s on you!
Government policy and youth transitions
Government policies today prevent youth from transitioning into adulthood before 18 and encourage youth to stay in a state of semi-dependence on their parents until their early 20s:
full time education in school is compulsory until the age of 16, and while 17-18 year olds are allowed to move into full-time work this has to have a training element and so will have a very low wage, which will be insufficient for independent living.
Free provision of education for 16-19 year olds encourages youth to stay on in full-time further education until 18.
The national minimum wage is teired by age so that you cannot earn the full wage until you are 23.
Under 25s are entitled to less Universal Credit than those aged 25 or over: £290 a month compared to £370.
16-17 year olds can be paid 50% less than 23 year olds!
The transition to adulthood as a journey
In the 1960s and 1970s young people boarded trains which set off for different destinations, largely shaped by social class. and gender, and once on these trains they had limited opportunities to change direction because they were already on set tracks.
However, while on these trains the occupants tended to bond with people similar to them (based on class and gender) and could work together to change change the direction they were going if they didn’t like the look of the destination.
The above analogy describes typical youth transitions in the 1960s and 1970s: predictable career paths and class solidarity, but these days are now gone.
Today’s youth get into cars and the driver of the car has no set destination because there are no rails, there is a complex road network and the drivers. of these cars (which are more diverse than the old trains) have to make decisions as they go which will affect the final destination.
Moreover, not all cars are equal: some are much better designed to stay the course, others will crash off and end up with shorter journeys than initially intended.
The later analogy describes the more diverse and uncertain routes young people must negotiate between further education, higher education, and early stage careers.
The school to work transition
Further education has greatly expanded since the 1970s and it is now expected that everyone will stay in education or training until at least age 18, and government policy encourages this by setting the minimum wage for under 18s at a very low rate and making it extremely difficult for under 18s to claim welfare benefits, and also by making education free until the age of 19 (allowing for some flexibility for those who fail GCSEs).
There is also a lot more choice of courses available in 16-19 education, with vocational options such as apprenticeships having expanded greatly over the last two decades, since the year 2000.
On top of this around 50% of the UK population now go on to higher education, usually in university, financed through student loans for both maintenance and fees.
This means the normal time of educational transition to full time paid employment last up until at least age 21 in most cases, longer given that it can take several months to find a graduate job, and indeed many graduates have. to settle for non-graduate jobs for a year or more before finding their way in to a career of their choice.
While there is a lot of diversity within this transition, social class and gender still have an impact.
The domestic and housing transition
This is rarely a straightforward process of people moving out once and into their own home or with their partner for the first time.
It is increasingly common for young people to move into intermediary households in young adulthood, such as student accommodation, and then move back in with their parents when they graduate for a year or more, and then possibly into their own first home as independent adults.
There has been a recent trend towards young adults staying living with their parents for longer. At age 23 60% of males and 44% of females still live with their parents.
Some couples will also go through the unfortunate experience of breaking up and then having to move back into the parental home afterwards.
None of this is helped by the increase in property prices. Only 41% of 18-35 year olds own their own homes today, down from 67% in the 1990s.
Conclusions and evaluations
There is a lot more diversity within youth transitions to adulthood in postmodern society, which reflects the increase in choices that young people have to make.
However this isn’t simply a matter of individuals freely choosing… following late modernism they HAVE to make choices under conditions of uncertainty: they are compelled to choose and face the consequences of any bad decisions they make.
Class and gender continue to shape transitions, especially social class: the middle classes have a lot more opportunities than the working classes.
Government policies also encourage youth to remain in state of at least semi-dependence on their parents until well into their 20s.
Signposting
This material is mainly relevant to the culture and identity module, normally taught as part of the first yer in A-level sociology.
A 44 year old mother of three was sentenced to 24 months in jail on Monday for using abortion pills to abort a foetus at just over 30 weeks, whereas the legal limit for abortions is currently 24 weeks.
She obtained the pills in March 2020 during Lockdown through the ‘pills by post scheme’ and lied to the authorities, saying she was under the 24 week limit. She got found out because she had to call emergency services having taken the pills, and the police were called by medical staff after she arrived in hospital.
She was prosecuted under the 1861 ‘Offences against the person act‘ which outlines a maximum possible life-sentence, but the judge residing stated she’d received the sentence for lying rather than the actual abortion, had she not lied he probably would have given her a non-custodial sentence.
Relevance to A-level sociology
You can apply victimology here. It seems to me that this woman is a victim of unfortunate circumstances and an outdated criminal justice system.
She got pregnant during lockdown, when access to abortion services would have been restricted, and came to a late decision to abort, by which time the only way she could do what she thought was right was to lie to the authorities.
She basically did this under extreme stress in the middle of lockdown with a lack of support, and apparently has suffered huge emotional trauma as a result.
I mean let’s face it: there are no legitimate arguments against this so this isn’t surprising. (Religious arguments aren’t rational thus not legitimate, because if they’re not rational they aren’t arguments, just faith-based opinions.)
There will obviously be a strong Feminist argument for changing the law here so such women can’t be prosecuted, I mean theoretically women can still go to jail for a life sentence for aborting a foetus at 25 weeks, and this is just overt state control over pregnant women’s bodies in modern Britain.
The fact that this law hasn’t been changed is a criticism of Liberal Feminism: clearly here social policy hasn’t been updated in so long that it’s not sufficient to protect such women when they need it!
Hopefully there will be an appeal very soon and this woman will get out of jail much earlier than 12 months (she’s serving half in jail), because her being in jail doesn’t serve any positive functions: not for society, not for her children and not for her.
Possibly the fact that this law hasn’t been updated for so long is because Parliament is still largely a patriarchal institution which is failing to adequately keep up to date with issues of gender justice.
I guess this also a test case for the Functionalist view that media reactions to laws will result in them changing, hopefully this will be the case here sooner rather than later!
The media can portray role models with glamorous lifestyles and exaggerate the reporting of events, according to the item in the AQA’s Crime and Deviance SCLY2/3 exam paper from November 2021 (1)
In these 10 mark ‘applying material from the item questions you need to use the two ways (in this case) as hooks and elaborate how these may contribute to an increase in crime, applying sociological concepts and theories.
According to the mark scheme you also get some marks for evaluation.
A key hint here is to remember that this is a Crime and Deviance paper, not a media paper, so don’t get too carried away with media concepts, although you should be credited for them, it’s always safer to use core crime and deviance material.
Another thing to be careful of is to include theories and concepts rather than relying on popular examples from the media. You can use examples, and you should do, but make sure you link them to theory.
The rest of this post considers how you might go about expanding on the two points mentioned in item A:
The media portraying glamorous lifestyles
The media exaggerating events.
How glamorous lifestyles in the media might contribute to an increase in crime
Examples of the media portraying glamorous lifestyles include cribs, many music videos and also lifestyle vloggers on YouTube, which tend to celebrate wealth, conspicuous consumption and people generally having a good time.
Such portrayals give the impression that being wealthy is the norm in a society, and, following Robert Merton’s strain theory this might increase the level of anomie, which can lead to different types of crime depending on how people respond.
Merton theorised that if people don’t have the opportunties to reach what they perceive to be the ordinary success goals in society some of them will turn to utilitarian crime to get what they think they should have, which means economic crimes such as burglary, robbery and theft.
This might explain the prevalence of crimes such as moped snatch-thefts in London recently, and also drug related crimes: those who can’t get jobs might believe the only way they can earn enough money to achieve ‘glamourous lifestyles’ is to deal drugs, maybe as part of a gang, which is something Venkatesh found in Gang Leader for a day.
The media, at least some aspects of it also glamorises gang, gun and drug culture: with many films showing crime as glamorous itself, which might encourage people into gangs and crime more generally.
Other people may look at glamorous western lifestyles in the media and react against it, seeing it as shallow and anti-religious and this might inspire anti-western sentiment and increase conflict in the form of fundamentalist terrorist attacks, this would be a rebellious response in Merton’s theory.
However most people don’t turn to crime because of media portrayals, they just give up on achieving and settle for ordinary jobs and average lifestyles or develop retreatist subcultures, which aren’t necessarily criminal, so it isn’t as simple as the media causing criminal behaviour, people aren’t that passive.
Finally, the portrayal of glamorous lifestyles might themselves be criminal – such as with people on social media boasting about their sports cars and wealth in order to encourage people into investing into get rich quick schemes, such as dodgy crypto DEFI schemes, whereas in reality these are just rug pull scams.
How media exaggeration might contribute to an increase in crime
You could apply moral panic theory here: when the media exaggerate the deviance of youth subcultures , according to Stan Cohen, this attracts more violent people to the subculture so the subculture becomes more violent in reality.
The problem with this is that it relies on the passive audience theory, but audiences are more active today.
There are theories which suggest violence in the media can cause people to be violent, such as Bandura’s Copy Cat theory, but there are many flaws with his original experiment which tried to prove a direct link between media violence and real life violence, and little evidence that there is a link.
Violence in the media may, however, desensitise people to violence in real life and make them less likely to react when they see violent acts.
Similarly with increasing fear causes by the exaggeration of violence. Ordinary people are less likely to go out in public meaning there are less people around to informally police the streets if crime is happening.
The news often exaggerates the extent of violent street crime compared to property crime, and working class street crime compared to middle class white collar crime, and both of these might cause an increase in particular types of crime.
One thing the media exaggerates is the extent of stranger sexual assault and child abduction by strangers, which keeps domestic abuse cases hidden, and may make it easier for partners and friends to keep on abusing because no-one is looking out for these criminals, who are the usual perpetrators.
Similarly with focusing on violent street crime: the lack of focus in the media agenda on high level fraud allows governments and corporations to carry on their criminal operations as usual, according to a Marxist perspective.
Signposting and sources
The main material to draw on to answer the above questions comes from the Crime and Deviance module.
To what extent do people of different social class backgrounds identify with their objective social class position and feel as if they share anything in common with people of the same class?
According to the Great British Class Survey (GBCS) there are seven objective social classes in Britain today, based on the amount of mainly economic but also cultural and social capital people have, which crucially has accumulated over time and is passed down the generations.
An individual’s objective class position impacts their life-chances but while most people can recognise the existence of social class and may recognise the class they are, most people today DO NOT consciously identify with that class position: they are more likely to be ambivalent about their own social class, and are unlikely to feel any sense of shared identity with those from the same objective class background.
This is especially true for those in the middle of the social class scale: there is widespread uncertainty around working and middle class identities, but the Elite class are more likely to see themselves as ‘elite’ and the precariat more likely to recognise that they have been labelled as such by wider society, but seek to distance themselves from that label.
Only 32% identify with a social class and the proportion rises the higher up the social class ladder you go, which is a sort of inversion of class consciousness.
50% of the elite identify as elite.
25% of the precariat identify as working class.
Of those who do did identify:
25% of people identify as upper middle class
41% identify as Middle Working Class
62% identify as Working Class.
So people shy away from identifying as middle class: People are most likely to identify as being ‘somewhere in the middle’ irrespective of where they fall in the objective class structure.
This post with take a brief look at the history of social class identification in Britain before exploring social class identities in contemporary British society, looking at ‘elite’ identity, working and middle class identities, and the Pecariat.
A Brief History of Class identification in Britain
Historians have shown that class awareness has a long history in Britain. Compared to other nations it is the persistence of working class identities that stands out.
In Britain the early onset of capitalist agriculture in the sixteenth century produced a large group of wage-earning farmers who also moved into part-time handicrafts to supplement their incomes.
Thus even before the industrial revolution there were a lot of independent skilled and unskilled trades people in Britain, and this cross fertilised with the socialist and labour movements in the 19th century, producing a strong shared identity.
In contrast to this was the British upper class which was not shattered through revolution as was the case in France. The British upper classes pursed a form of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ which was embedded in industrialism and colonialism and they prospered through innovation and free-trade enterprise.
The expanding middle class of businessmen, managers and white collar workers existed in an uncertain position in the middle of the aloof upper classes and proud working classes, and they were in a sort of mediating position between the two.
The franchise being extended in 1832, 1867 and 1885 to gradually incorporate more of the middle classes did something to distinguish the middle classes from the working classes who still could not vote.
Gradually throughout the 19th century the middle classes engaged in conspicuous consumption to differentiate themselves from the working classes below them, but their position remained somewhat uncertain and insecure.
During the 19th century the class position of women was even more ambiguous than that of men. Women’s occupations consisted of mainly domestic work (such as cleaning) for upper-middle class and upper class families, nursing and teaching. They thus occupied either working class positions in closer contact with higher classes compared to men, or lower-middle class positions which didn’t command the same status as men.
For much of the 20th century there was a preoccupation with who was working class and who was middle class, further fuelled by the changing nature of work during that period.
The work of George Orwell is a good indication of the fascination and complexities surrounding understanding class in the early 20th century.
Elite class identity
Britain’s ordinary class elite is the top 6% of society who have the highest levels of economic, cultural and social capital. They are most likely to own their own homes (a crucial source of wealth) and be in high income professional occupations such as law, finance and journalism.
Britain’s ordinary class elite are most likely to positively identify as ‘elite’, although they also tend to ‘play down’ how important their enormous amounts of economic, social and cultural capital have been in providing them with better life chances, preferring to delude themselves that their success is purely down to their hard work and talent.
While Britain’s ordinary class elite makes up only 6% of the population, they made up 25% of the British Class Survey sample. They were queuing up to do this in droves, and Savage (2015) suggests this is because the survey was a self-legitimating activity for them: it was a chance to get quantitative/ scientific/ objective confirmation that they were at the top of British society.
And this class were the most likely to share their class status to social media, suggesting again positive identification with and a sense of pride in their social class status. However, they usually did this with a sense of irony or humour, in an attempt to distract from the bragging aspect.
The elite don’t really identify with everyone from the same class: they tend to identify more with people in similar occupations and in their local neighbourhoods: so those with similar value properties, they also tended to stress that they had some friends outside of the elite too to demonstrate that they weren’t living in an isolated social class bubble.
It is very important to recognise that NOT actively recognising that their elite status is important is the primary means whereby this class maintain their dominance. They benefit from high levels of cultural, economic and social capital, but in playing down the existence of these advantages, they help to keep such advantages hidden, but the GBCS revealed just how obvious such advantages were in keeping this class and their children at the top of British society.
Working and Middle Class Identities
The traditional view of class is that people would identify with their objective class position. This was the view of THOMPSON: the working classes would unite in tight knit working class communities and come together around collective political campaigns for labour interests. However, in the 21st century there is a more muted, individualised and complex set of class identifications.
The GBSC found that people were ambivalent about class, preferring to say that they straddle middle class and working class boundaries.
Class is not important as a badge for most people, but its mention does prompt emotional reactions, especially negative ones. People wanted to avoid the labels of CHAV or as someone who has ‘middle class problems’.
People also felt a sense of shame if they were from a lower social class background but had not climbed the class ladder.
People shy away from identifying as middle class. They were most likely to identify as being ‘somewhere in the middle’ irrespective of where they fall in the objective class structure.
Identity among the Precariat
The Precariat were well aware of the negative labels attached to them by the mainstream media and the widespread dislike of them by many in mainstream society.
They were the most reluctant to take part in the GBSC, probably because they had little to gain from doing it: they didn’t want to take part in what was effectively ritual humiliation the end result of which was receiving a formal label which placed them at the bottom of the social class scale.
In terms of identity, the Precariat didn’t positively identify as Precariat, and had no interest in shouting about their low social status (unlike many members of the elite) and they were reluctant to even talk about social class, preferring instead to identify in other ways, such as with other members of their local community or through using other markers such as gender.
Sources
Savage, M (2015) Social Class in the Twenty First Century.
