The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

by Richard Wilkinson

  Then, the experiment was repeated, but this time each boy was asked to confirm an announcement of his name, village, father’s and grandfather’s names, and caste. After this public announcement of caste, the boys did more mazes, and this time there was a large caste gap in how well they did – the performance of the low-caste boys dropped significantly (Figure 8.5).

  This is striking evidence that performance and behaviour in an educational task can be profoundly affected by the way we feel we are seen and judged by others. When we expect to be viewed as inferior, our abilities seem to be diminished.

  The same phenomenon has been demonstrated in experiments with white and black high-school students in America, most convincingly by social psychologists Claude Steele at Stanford University, and Joshua Aronson at New York University.164 In one study they administered a standardized test used for college students’ admission to graduate programmes. In one condition, the students were told that the test was a measure of ability; in a second condition, the students were told that the test was not a measure of ability. The white students performed equally under both conditions, but the black students performed much worse when they thought their ability was being judged. Steele and Aronson labelled this effect ‘stereotype threat’ and it’s now been shown that it is a general effect, which applies to sex differences as well as racial and ethnic differences.165

  Figure 8.5 The effect of caste identity on performance in Indian school boys.163

  Despite the work we mentioned on social anxiety and the effects of being judged negatively which we discussed in Chapter 3, it is perhaps surprising how easily stereotypes and stereotype threats are established, even in artificial conditions. Jane Elliott, an American schoolteacher, conducted an experiment with her students in 1968, in an effort to teach them about racial inequality and injustice.166 She told them that scientists had shown that people with blue eyes were more intelligent and more likely to succeed than people with brown eyes, who were lazy and stupid. She divided her class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups, and gave the blue-eyed group extra privileges, praise and attention. The blue-eyed group quickly asserted its superiority over the brown-eyed children, treating them contemptuously, and their school performance improved. The brown-eyed group just as quickly adopted a submissive timidity, and their marks declined. After a few days, Elliott told the children she had got the information mixed up and that actually it was brown eyes that indicated superiority. The classroom situation rapidly reversed.

  New developments in neurology provide biological explanations for how our learning is affected by our feelings.167 We learn best in stimulating environments when we feel sure we can succeed. When we feel happy or confident our brains benefit from the release of dopamine, the reward chemical, which also helps with memory, attention and problem solving. We also benefit from serotonin which improves mood, and from adrenaline which helps us to perform at our best. When we feel threatened, helpless and stressed, our bodies are flooded by the hormone cortisol which inhibits our thinking and memory. So inequalities of the kind we have been describing in this chapter, in society and in our schools, have a direct and demonstrable effect on our brains, on our learning and educational achievement.

  DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT FOLKS

  Another way in which inequality directly affects educational achievement is through its impact on the aspirations, norms and values of people who find themselves lower down the social hierarchy. While education is viewed by the middle class and by teachers and policy makers as the way upwards and outwards for the poor and working class, these values are not always subscribed to by the poor and working class themselves.

  In her 2006 book Educational Failure and Working Class White Children in Britain, anthropologist Gillian Evans describes the working-class culture of Bermondsey, in east London.168 She shows how the kinds of activities expected of children in schools fit with the way middle-class parents expect their children to play and interact at home, but clash with the way in which working-class families care for, and interact with, their children. To a degree, working-class people resist the imposition of education and middle-class values, because becoming educated would require them to give up ways of being that they value. One woman tells Evans that being ‘common’ means ‘knowin’ ’ow to ’ave a good laugh ’cos you’re not stuck up’. The things that the women she describes like to talk about are their families, their health, work and ways to get money, housework, relationships, shopping, sex and gossip. Talking about abstract ideas, books and culture, is seen as posh and pretentious. The children of these working-class mothers are constrained by minimal rules in their homes. Evans describes children who are allowed to eat and drink what they like, when they like; to smoke at home; to do homework or not, as they please. ‘If they want to learn, they will, if they don’t, they won’t and that’s that.’ Of course these families want the best for their children, but that ‘best’ isn’t always ‘education, education, education’.

  That poor and working-class children resist formal education and middle-class values does not, of course, mean that they have no aspirations or ambitions. In fact, when we first looked at data on children’s aspirations from a UNICEF report on childhood wellbeing,110 we were surprised at its relationship to income inequality (Figure 8.6). More children reported low aspirations in more equal countries; in unequal countries children were more likely to have high aspirations. Some of this may be accounted for by the fact that in more equal societies, less-skilled work may be less stigmatized, in comparison to more unequal societies where career choices are dominated by rather star-struck ideas of financial success and images of glamour and celebrity.

  Figure 8.6 Aspirations of 15-year-olds and inequality in rich countries.

  In more unequal countries, we found a larger gap between aspirations and actual opportunities and expectations. If we compare Figure 8.1 on maths and reading scores in different countries to Figure 8.6, it is clear that aspirations are higher in countries where educational achievement is lower. More children might be aspiring to higher-status jobs, but fewer of them will be qualified to get them. If inequality leads to unrealistic hopes it must also lead to disappointment.

  Gillian Evans quotes a teacher at an inner-city primary school, who summed up the corrosive effect of inequality on children:

  These kids don’t know they’re working class; they won’t know that until they leave school and realize that the dreams they’ve nurtured through childhood can’t come true.168

  In the next two chapters we’ll show how young women and young men in more unequal societies respond to their low social status, and in Chapter 12 we’ll return to the theme of education and life chances when we examine the impact of inequality on social mobility.

  9

  Teenage births: recycling deprivation

  Just saying ‘No’ prevents teenage pregnancy the way ‘Have a nice day’ cures chronic depression.

  Faye Wattleton, Conference speech, Seattle, 1988

  In the summer of 2005, three sisters hit the headlines of Britain’s tabloid newspapers – all three were teenage mothers. The youngest was the first of the girls to become pregnant and had her baby at the age of 12. ‘We were in bed at my mum’s house messing around and sex just sort of happened,’ she said; ‘I didn’t tell anyone because I was too scared and didn’t know what to do . . . I wish it had happened to someone else.’169 Soon after, the next older sister had a baby at age 14. ‘It was just one of those things. I thought it would never happen to me,’ she said. ‘At first I wanted an abortion because I didn’t want to be like [my sister], but I couldn’t go through with it.’ The oldest sister, the last of the girls to find out she was pregnant, gave birth aged 16; unlike her sisters she seemed to welcome motherhood. ‘I left school . . . as I wasn’t really interested,’ she admitted, ‘all my friends were having babies and I wanted to be a mum, too’. At the time their stories became news, the girls were all living at home with their mother, sharing their bedroo
ms with their babies, the youngest two struggling with school, and all three trying to get by on social security benefits. With no qualifications and no support from the fathers of their babies, their futures were bleak. Media commentators and members of the public were quick to condemn the sisters and their mother, portraying them as feckless scroungers. ‘Meet the kid sisters . . . benefit bonanza’ . . . ‘Girls’ babies are the real victims,’ exclaimed the newspapers.170–171 Their mother blamed the lack of sex education in school.

  WHY IT MATTERS

  The press furore brings society’s fears and concerns around teenage motherhood into sharp focus. Often described as ‘babies having babies’, teenage motherhood is seen as bad for the mother, bad for the baby and bad for society.

  There is no doubt that babies born to teenage mothers are more likely to have low birthweight, to be born prematurely, to be at higher risk of dying in infancy and, as they grow up, to be at greater risk of educational failure, juvenile crime and becoming teenage parents themselves.172–173 Girls who give birth as teenagers are more likely to be poor and uneducated. But are all the bad things associated with teenage birth really caused by the age of the mother? Or are they simply a result of the cultural world in which teenage mothers give birth?

  This issue is hotly debated. On the one hand, some argue that teenage motherhood is not a health problem because young age is not in itself a cause of worse outcomes.174 In fact, among poor African-Americans, cumulative exposure to poverty and stress across their lifetimes compromises their health to such an extent that their babies do better if these women have their children at a young age.175–176 This idea is known as ‘weathering’ and suggests that, for poor and disadvantaged women, postponing pregnancy until later ages doesn’t actually mean that they have healthier babies. Others have shown that the children of teenage mothers are more likely to end up excluded from mainstream society, with worse physical and emotional health and more deprivation. This is true even after taking account of other childhood circumstances such as social class, education, whether the parents were married or not, the parents’ personalities, and so on.177 But although we can sometimes separate out the influences of maternal age and economic circumstances in research studies, in real life they often seem inextricably intertwined and teenage motherhood is associated with an inter-generational cycle of deprivation.178

  But how exactly are young women’s individual experiences and choices – their personal choices about sleeping with their boyfriends, choices around contraception and abortion, choices about qualifications and careers, shaped by the society they live in? Like the issues discussed in earlier chapters, the teenage birth rate is strongly related to relative deprivation and to inequality.

  BORN UNEQUAL

  There are social class differences in both teenage conceptions and births but the differences are smaller for conceptions than for births, because middle-class young women are more likely to have abortions. Teenage birth rates are higher in communities that also have high divorce rates, low levels of trust and low social cohesion, high unemployment, poverty, and high crime rates.173 It has been suggested by others that teenage motherhood is a choice that women make when they feel they have no other prospects for achieving the social credentials of adulthood, such as a stable intimate relationship or rewarding employment.179 Sociologist Kristin Luker claims that it is ‘the discouraged among the disadvantaged’ who become teenage mothers.180

  But it is important to remember that it isn’t only poor young women who become teenage mothers: like all the problems we have looked at, inequality in teenage birth rates runs right across society. In Figure 9.1, we show the percentage of young British women who become teenage mothers in relation to household income. Each year almost 5 per cent of teenagers living in the poorest quarter of homes have a first baby, four times the rate in the richest quarter. But even in the second richest quarter of households the rate is double that of the richest quarter (2.4 per cent and 1.2 per cent). Similar patterns are seen in the United States. Although most of these births are to older teenagers, aged 18–19 years, the pattern is evident, and even stronger, for the 15–17-year-olds.

  Figure 9.1 There is a gradient in teenage birth rates by household income, from poorest to richest.181

  Figure 9.2 Teenage birth rates are higher in more unequal countries.185

  Figure 9.2 shows that the international teenage birth rates provided by UNICEF182 are related to income inequality and Figure 9.3 shows the same relationship for the fifty states of the USA, using teen pregnancy rates from the US National Vital Statistics System183 and the Alan Guttmacher Institute.184 There is a strong tendency for more unequal countries and more unequal states to have higher teenage birth rates – much too strong to be attributable to chance. The UNICEF report on teenage births showed that at least one and a quarter million teenagers become pregnant each year in the rich OECD countries and about three-quarters of a million go on to become teenage mothers.182 The differences in teen birth rates between countries are striking. The USA and UK top the charts. At the top of the league in our usual group of rich countries, the USA has a teenage birth rate of 52.1 (per 1,000 women aged 15–19), more than four times the EU average and more than ten times higher than that of Japan, which has a rate of 4.6.

  Rachel Gold and colleagues have studied income inequality and teenage births in the USA, and shown that teen birth rates are highest in the most unequal, as well as the most relatively deprived counties. She also reported that the effect of inequality was strongest for the youngest mothers, those aged 15–17 years.186 For the US states, we show data for live births and abortions combined. There are substantial differences in pregnancy rates between US states. Mississippi has a rate close to twice that of Utah.

  Figure 9.3 Teenage pregnancy rates are higher in more unequal US states.

  We might expect patterns of conceptions, abortions and births to be influenced by factors such as religion and ethnicity. We’d expect predominantly Catholic countries to have high rates of teenage births, because of low rates of abortion. But, while predominantly Catholic Portugal and Ireland have high rates that would indeed fit this alternative explanation, Italy and Spain have unexpectedly low rates, although they are also predominantly Catholic. Within countries, different ethnic groups can have different cultures and values around sexuality, contraception, abortion, early marriage and women’s roles in society. In the USA, for example, Hispanic and African-American girls are almost twice as likely to be teenage mothers as white girls, and in the UK similarly, comparatively high rates are seen in the Bangladeshi and Caribbean communities.182 But, because these communities are minority populations, these differences don’t actually have much impact on the ranking of countries and states by teenage pregnancy or birth rates, and so don’t affect our interpretation of the link with inequality.

  But hidden within the simple relationships revealed in Figures 9.2 and 9.3 are the real-life complexities of what it means to be a teenage mother in any particular country. For example, in Japan, Greece and Italy, more than half of the teenagers giving birth are married – in fact in Japan, 86 per cent of teen mothers are married, whereas in the USA, the UK and New Zealand, less than a quarter of these mothers are married.182 So not only do these latter countries have higher overall rates of teen births, but those births are more likely to be associated with the broad range of health and social problems that we think of as typical consequences of early motherhood – problems that affect both the mother and the child. Within the USA, Hispanic teenage mothers are more likely to be married than those from other ethnic groups, but they are also more likely to be poor;187–188 the same is true for Bangladeshis in the UK.

  So what do we know about who becomes a teenage mother that can help us understand this particular effect of inequality?

  THE FAST LANE TO ADULTHOOD

  Interestingly, there is not much of a connection between teenage birth rates and birth rates for women of all ages in rich countries. The mos
t unequal countries, the US, UK, New Zealand and Portugal, have much higher teenage birth rates relative to older women’s birth rates than the more equal countries, such as Japan, Sweden, Norway and Finland, which have teenage birth rates that are lower relative to the rates of birth of older women.182 So whatever drives teenage birth rates up in more unequal countries is unconnected with the factors driving overall fertility. Unequal societies affect teenage childbearing in particular.

  A report from the Rowntree Foundation called Young People’s Changing Routes to Independence, which compares how children born in 1958 and 1970 grew up, describes a ‘widening gap between those on the fast and the slow lanes to adulthood’.189 In the slow lane, young people born into families in the higher socio-economic classes spend a long time in education and career training, putting off marriage and childbearing until they are established as successful adults. For young people on the fast track, truncated education often leads them into a disjointed pattern of unemployment, low-paid work and training schemes, rather than an ordered, upward career trajectory.

  As sociologists Hilary Graham and Elizabeth McDermott point out, teenage motherhood is a pathway through which women become excluded from the activities and connections of the wider society, and a way in which generations become trapped by inequality.190 But as well as the constraints that relative poverty imposes on life chances for young people, there seem to be additional reasons why teenage motherhood is sensitive to degrees of inequality in society.