DIAL

DIAL is a podcast about inequality over the life course, and its structure is simple: one researcher, one project, one conversation about what the evidence shows. The guests are principal investigators and coordinators from DIAL research projects, based at universities including Bristol, Munich, Turku, Bielefeld, UCL and Erasmus University Rotterdam. Episodes are organised into series, and each series has its own brief. The second series is built around findings from the Equal Lives project. Series four looks back across the programme at how and when inequality manifests and what its longer-term consequences might be. Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts produces and presents, and begins interviews by asking what a project investigated and why. The talk then turns to results, which are specific. Susan Harkness, principal investigator of Equal Lives, traces how economic disadvantage accumulates for single mothers, starting from a long-standing assumption that they are poorer because no male breadwinner lives with them. Her data shows married mothers' earnings falling further after a birth, but fathers working longer hours cushion the household, while in single-mother families the same event hits overall income far harder. Andreas Peichel of the University of Munich asks how much of today's inequality in earnings can be traced back to childhood circumstances. He describes new ways to measure its 'unfair' share, including machine learning and large Swedish datasets spanning several generations. Sakari Lemola discusses PremLife, a project on what protects children born pre-term and builds their resilience. That work compares Germany, where pupils are sorted into tracks after the first few school years, with the UK and Finland, where they are not. It also follows people born pre-term into adulthood to look at their socio-emotional outcomes. Hans van Kipperslois leads a project on nature versus nurture, then explains why the question is so hard to test: genetic endowments and parental investments are tangled together, and even birth weight is shaped by a mother's smoking. Richard Blundell turns to adolescence and working life, describing an almost complete halt to apprenticeships for young people outside university; much of his work with colleagues has also fed into the Deaton Review on Inequality. In an episode presented as the last of series four, DIAL's scientific coordinator Elina Kilpijakonen reflects as the programme draws to a close. She notes how housework habits shifted under lockdown and then slipped back once it ended. She also describes conversations with policymakers and non-governmental organisations about labour-market gaps between mothers and fathers, and about childhood disadvantage. Guests get room to explain their methods as well as their findings, and a technical idea is sometimes restated in simpler words, as when gene-environment interplay becomes nature versus nurture. Read together, the episode titles cover the life course: pre-term children, childhood, adolescence, working life, motherhood and later-life outcomes. What DIAL offers is research findings explained by the people who produced them.