Intersectionality or Cumulative Disadvantage? Ethnicity, Gender and Workless Households Effects on Youth Employment

The concept of ‘cumulative disadvantage’ infers that differences between or within groups amount to more than just inequality. According to Blau & Duncan in their famous work ‘The American Occupational Structure’ (1967) cumulative disadvantage (or advantage) refers to “persisting direct and interaction effects of a status variable, where the interaction effects imply group differences in the returns to socioeconomic resources.” The importance of this approach relies in its strength to highlight that group differences are more than just average differences; on the contrary, they can vary across a varied range of factors, such as ‘growing up in a poor vs. a rich family, growing up in a single-parent vs. a two-parent family, growing up in a poor vs. an affluent neighborhood, or being assigned to a low vs. a high academic track in school’ (DiPrete and Eirich 2006: 273). ‘Cumulative disadvantage’ often implies as well that ‘exposure to earlier disadvantages continues to have an effect even after later characteristics are controlled for’ (Layte and Whelan 2002: 230).

Sociologists have had a long-term interest in understanding how the characteristics of disadvantage include an examination of parental background, gender and ethnicity as well as regional effects (Platt 2007, 2010). This debate has increasingly been framed in terms of understanding the effects of multiple disadvantages from a discussion of intersectionality (Cho, Crenshaw, Williams and McCall 2013, Collins 2015, Crenshaw 1991). Rather than emphasizing cumulative disadvantages, this concept has put the attention on the uniqueness of some combination of characteristics, such as being black and being a woman in the US. In a recent debate, McBride, Hebson and Holgate (2015) and Mooney (2016) have drawn the attention to the importance of considering both intra- and inter-group differences. In particular, the importance of intersectionality lies in the fact that the intersection of different forms of inequality (such as gender or race-based inequality) is different from their mere sum: the experiences of Black women are, in a way, ‘more’ than the sum of racism and sexism.

Surprisingly little examination has been given to the interrelationship between ethnicity, parental employment and educational and labour market opportunities during the recent economic crisis. We address this gap investigating whether different dimensions of inequality overlap in particular ways to create (or not) opportunities for young individuals. In practise, we study how the likelihood of being NEET (not in employment, education or training) is mediated by gender, ethnicity and parental employment, drawing on data from Understanding Society.

Our findings corroborate evidence that for the majoritarian population, young people with workless parents have a higher likelihood of being NEET themselves; however, we also show that this does not apply to all ethnic minority groups (and genders). In particular, we find that having been raised in a workless household is much less detrimental for Indian men and Bangladeshis than for the white British.