Understanding and addressing trust barriers in social surveys
Event
Sir Roger Jowell Memorial Lecture 2025
This annual event is organised in collaboration with City, University of London and the Social Research Association.
Register
The new rush hour of life: Balancing paid and unpaid work in mid-life?
A drinks reception will follow in the Pavilion at City, University of London from 19.30-21.00.
Changes in fertility and mortality are altering the number of kin individuals can expect to have surviving at different ages across the life course. As four-generation families become the norm, more people in their late 50s and 60s find themselves providing care for their grandchildren, facilitating their adult children – especially daughters – to stay in the labour market and progress, whilst also providing support to their frail older parents in their 80s and 90s.
At the same time, improvements in life expectancy are leading to increases in the state pension age and the policy expectation that more people will remain in paid work for longer.
Drawing upon the UK’s rich reservoir of panel data, including the British birth cohorts and the UK Household Longitudinal Study, this lecture will examine changes in the economic and social lives of people in mid-life, focusing especially on how women and men balance the demands of paid and unpaid (care) work in this new rush hour of life.
The research findings from the ESRC Connecting Generations research team at the University of Southampton highlight the potential incompatibility of government policies that implicitly reply on the family providing the lion’s share of social care whilst also promoting longer working lives.
Speaker
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Jane FalkinghamVice President University of SouthamptonJane Falkingham is Vice President (Engagement & International) and Professor of Demography & International Social Policy at the University of Southampton. She is also the Director of the ESRC Centre for Population Change (CPC), whose remit is to ‘improve understanding of the drivers and consequences of population change both nationally and globally’ and PI of the ESRC Connecting Generations research collaboration which brings together CPC experts at the University of Southampton, University of St Andrews , and University of Stirling, with partners at the University of Oxford Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, and the Resolution Foundation. Jane pursues a multi-disciplinary research agenda, located at the interface between population studies and social policy, spanning both developed and developing countries. She has published more than 200 journal articles, books and book chapters, and supervised 30 PhD students to successful completion. Jane’s work particularly concerns population ageing, social care and social security, including the design of pensions systems and their impact on resources in later life. She is also interested in intergenerational flows of support and how these vary across the life course and between cohorts. Jane has a long history of service to the academic community both in the UK and internationally. She was a Member of ESRC Council (2017-2022) and chaired the ESRC Covid-19 Rapid Response funding panel. Jane was President of the European Association for Population Studies (2018-2020) and the British Society for Population Studies (2015-2017). Jane was elected as a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences in 2011 and the Royal Society of Arts in 2016. She was awarded an OBE for services to Social Science in 2015 and Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2023.
