Shireen Kanji

The health impact of extreme weather events in Sub-Saharan Africa

Extreme weather events are known to have serious consequences for human health and are predicted to increase in frequency as a result of climate change. Africa is one of the regions that risks being most seriously affected. This paper quantifies the impact of extreme rainfall and temperature events on the incidence of diarrhea, malnutrition and mortality in young children in Sub-Saharan Africa. The panel data set is constructed from Demographic and Health Surveys for 108 regions from 19 Sub-Saharan African countries between 1992 and 2001 and climate data from the Africa Rainfall and Temperature Evaluation System from 1980 to 2001. The results show that both excess rainfall and extreme temperatures significantly raise the incidence of diarrhea and weight-for-height malnutrition among children under the age of three, but have little impact on the long-term health indicators, including height-for-age malnutrition and the under-five mortality rate. The authors use the results to simulate the additional health cost as a proportion of gross domestic product caused by increased climate variability. The projected health cost of increased diarrhea attributable to climate change in 2020 is in the range of 0.2 to 0.5 percent of gross domestic product in Africa.

Do fathers work fewer paid hours when their female partner is the main or an equal earner

Mothers are increasingly likely to be the main or equal earners in heterosexual couples with children. This study assesses the impact of the mother being the main or an equal earner on her partner’s hours of work. The performance of normative gender roles predicts that fathers increase their hours whereas specialization theories predict they will decrease their hours. Another possibility is that fathers work fewer hours because they have a relatively weak labour market position. We test these alternative propositions using panel data on co-resident parents from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Survey. The results show that fathers with a female partner who is the main earner work considerably fewer hours than other fathers. This also holds for equal-earner fathers to a lesser extent. In part, fathers work fewer hours because their partner is the main or an equal earner, but they are also less likely to work in occupations entailing long hours.

Who am I? Mothers’ shifting identities, loss and sensemaking after workplace exit:

We analyse mothers’ retrospective accounts of their transition from professional worker to stay-at-home mother using a framework that integrates sensemaking and border theory. The data come from in-depth interviews with former professional and managerial women in London. Continuing struggles to reconcile professional and maternal identities before and after workplace exit illustrate how identity change is integral to workplace exit. The concept of ‘choice’, which takes place at one point in time, obfuscates this drawn-out process. Mothers pay a high cost in lost professional identities, especially in the initial stages after workplace exit. They cope with this loss and the disjuncture of leaving employment by moving back and forth across the border between home and work – a classic action of sensemaking. Subsequent communal sensemaking and community action bolster mothers’ fragile status at home, eventually leading to reconciliation of their loss and finally enabling them to view their exit ‘choice’ as right.

Are Couples with Young Children More Likely to Split Up When the Mother is the Main or an Equal Earner

This study examines how a mother being the main or an equal earner impacts the relationship stability of heterosexual couple parents, using the UK’s Millennium Cohort Survey. Various theories alternatively predict that such couples experience a higher or lower risk of divorce than male-breadwinner couples. Alternatively the characteristics of these couples may predispose them to relatively higher or lower relationship stability than male-breadwinner couples. Using piecewise constant exponential event history models, we test these propositions between key stages in a child’s life: baby, toddler, school entry and age seven. In some periods, a mother being the main or an equal earner is associated with a lower risk of relationship breakdown than for male-breadwinner couples, and more so within cohabiting than married couples. However, there is a strong tendency for couples to shift over time from mothers being main or equal earners to a male-breadwinner arrangement.

Male Breadwinning Revisited: How Specialisation, Gender Role Attitudes and Work Characteristics Affect Overwork and Underwork in Europe

We examine how male breadwinning and fatherhood relate to men’s overwork and underwork in western Europe. Male breadwinners should be less likely to experience overwork than other men, particularly when they have children, if specialising in paid work suits them. However, multinomial logistic regression analysis of the European Social Survey data from 2010 (n = 4662) challenges this position: male breadwinners, with and without children, want to work fewer than their actual hours, making visible one of the downsides of specialisation. Male breadwinners wanting to work fewer hours is specifically related to the job interfering with family life, as revealed by a comparison of the average marginal effects of variables across models. Work–life interference has an effect over and beyond the separate effects of work characteristics and family structure, showing the salience of the way work and life articulate.

Grandparent care:: A key factor in mothers’ labour force participation in the UK

The relationships between paid work and informal care are critical to understanding how paid work is made possible. An extensive source of childcare in the UK is the intergenerational care grandparents provide. Using data from the UKs Millennium Cohort Study, a nationally representative sample of children born in 2000, biprobit and instrumental variables (IV) analysis of mothers’ participation (given the social construction of caring responsibility) identifies a significant causal effect of grandparents’ childcare in that it: (i) raises the labour force participation of mothers with a child of school entry age on average by 12 percentage points (the average marginal effect); (ii) raises the participation of the group of mothers who use grandparent childcare by 33 percentage points compared to the situation if they did not have access to this care (the average treatment effect on the treated). Thus grandparent-provided childcare has a substantial impact on the labour market in the UK, an impact that may not be sustainable with forthcoming changes to the state pension age. Grandparents’ childcare increases the labour force participation of lone and partnered mothers at all levels of educational qualifications but by different degrees. Grandparents’ childcare enables mothers to enter paid work rather than extending their hours of paid work.

Work, employment and society sans frontières: extending and deepening our reach

Work, employment and society (WES ) was launched in 1987 in a period in which a number of features of British society were changing rapidly. The vibrancy and the optimism of the 1960s looked increasingly remote and sociology and the study of work reflected the more straitened times that came with the social transformations wrought by Thatcherism. The early 1980s had seen savage deflation, a consequent sharp contraction of the manufacturing industry and a series of set piece confrontations with unions (in the print and steel industries and on the docks) culminating in the defeat of the miners’ union after a year-long strike (1984–5). A further result was rapid contraction of the numbers of trade union members and the demoralization of those that remained. One focus of industrial sociology, shopfloor trade unionism epitomized by Beynon’s (1984) study of Ford’s Halewood plant, became difficult if not impossible to repeat. The differences to and implications for the current sociology of work are discussed in the recent WES book review symposium of Beynon’s study. Richard Brown’s editorial introduction to the first issue drew upon these societal developments to explain the rationale for the journal. Reviewing the sociology of work he noted that it had traditionally focused on male, manual workers in manufacturing industries and to a lesser extent on those who supervised and managed them, exactly the constituency hit hardest by the ongoing changes. The limitations of the focus on one gender, in one predominantly UK-based sector, became obvious with the relative and absolute decline in UK manufacturing and the new international division of labour; the growth of unemployment; the increase in women’s employment; and employer attempts to establish more flexible patterns of employment. The limitations of more traditional approaches were also heightened by developments in other areas of social science with broader concerns. The persistence of unemployment and the increasing North–South divide, along with entrenched patterns of low pay, had expanded interest in labour markets; discrimination against women and minorities was made more visible; and, following the impact of Braverman’s Labor and 613747WES0010.1177/0950017015613747Work, employment and societyEditorial research-article2015

Age group conflict or cooperation? Children and pensioners in Russia in crisis

Purpose – This research aims to illustrate the differential treatment of children and pensioners in Russia and to explain why this has not led to age group conflict through an illustration of age group interdependency.Design/methodology/approach – Age group conflict is revealed through analysis of the governments policies to age groups and expenditure preferences. Interdependency is analysed by the calculation of poverty rates and contribution of age specific benefits, using nationally representative sample survey data.Findings – The Russian government treated pensioners preferentially to children, even though children were at higher risk of poverty. However, within each age group poverty rates are mediated by household structures. Pensioners who live with children face higher poverty rates than the average for pensioners and those who co‐reside with lone mothers face the highest poverty rates of all pensioners, while their pension contribution to the household is of vital significance. Children living w...

Job Insecurity: Differential Effects of Subjective and Objective Measures on Life Satisfaction Trajectories of Workers Aged 27–30 in Germany

Job insecurity has become increasingly evident in European countries in recent years. In Germany, legislation has increased insecurity through erosion of the standard employment relationship. Fixed-term contracts are central to definitions of insecurity based on atypical or precarious work but there is still limited understanding of what creates insecurity and how it affects workers. Drawing on Bourdieu’s thesis that “insecurity is everywhere”, the relationships between subjective and objective measures of insecurity are examined for their impact on the 5-year trajectories of life satisfaction of men and women in the age group 27–30. Latent growth curve analysis of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for 2010–2014 highlights the adverse and lasting effects of subjective concerns about job insecurity on life satisfaction trajectories. This association cuts across educational groups, with far reaching implications as subjective concerns about job security permeate young worker’s lives well beyond the objective condition of being employed on a fixed-term contract.

Young women’s strong preference for children and subsequent occupational gender segregation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse how and whether young women’s strong and early preference for having children relates to the degree of occupational segregation of the careers they envisage for themselves and the careers they actually enter by the time they reach age 23. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on theories predicting that young women act to replicate gendered social stereotypes in their career choice and to anticipate careers they perceive to be reconcilable with future motherhood, the authors conduct quantitative analyses using panel data from the Transitions from Education to Employment Survey, a longitudinal survey of young people in Switzerland. OLS regression analyses how expressing a strong desire to have children at age 16 impacts: the proportion of women in the career engaged in at age 23 and the career anticipated age 16, relative to women not expressing this strong preference. Logistic regression examines whether selection into wanting children could be held respon...