Keynote Speakers

Keynote 1: How Knowledge is Gendered: Brilliance, Credentials and AI

Claudia Buchmann (Ohio State University)

Monday, August 28, 2023, 2:00pm - 3:00pm, Room S 003

Brilliance is viewed as a masculine trait in all societies, even by children as young as six years of age. In this lecture, I argue that this “brilliance bias” is detrimental to both men and women – it is a central factor in both women’s underrepresentation in STEM fields and men’s underrepresentation in college and advanced degrees. I provide two empirical examples: the first shows how achievement growth in high school STEM courses increases girls’ self-perceived intelligence, thereby refuting the stereotype, and increasing their persistence in STEM fields; the second rallies evidence about how the brilliance bias may lead some males to underperform in education and attain lower credentials. I then consider the prospects of dismantling the brilliance bias in the new era of artificial intelligence.

Keynote 2: The Myth of the Middle Class Squeeze: Employment and Income by Class in Six Western Countries, 1980-2020

Daniel Oesch (University of Lausanne)

Tuesday, August 29, 2023, 2:00pm - 3:00pm, Room S 003

The public debate depicts the middle class as the great losers of the last decades, while people above and below seemingly fared better in terms of job and income growth. This narrative is mistaken both conceptually and empirically. Based on the Luxembourg Income Study 1980-2020, we show for France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US that employment of the middle class strongly expanded, while the working class shrank. The middle class also made consistently larger income gains than the working class. Finally, our cohort analysis shows that the promise of doing better than one’s parents held for the middle class, but vanished for the working class. The real losers of the last few decades were the working class.

Keynote 3: Engines of (in-)equality? Analysing the role of schools for social inequality in learning

Jan Skopek (Trinity College Dublin)

Wednesday, August 30, 2023, 11:15am - 12:15pm, Room S 003

Research in sociology of education highlights the ambiguous role schools play in social mobility. On the one hand, critical perspectives view schools as institutions of social reproduction that generate inequality by allocating students to unequal learning environments. Positive accounts of schooling, on the other hand, view schools as a force of equalization as schools create more standardized and equal learning opportunities than non-school environments. After introducing theories of schooling, the talk will discuss common research designs that attempt to empirically identify the causal effect schools have on student learning and inequality therein. Among those, the lecture will highlight the differential exposure approach (DEA), a versatile causal framework to identify schooling effects in large scale assessment studies. Fresh evidence on the causal effects of schooling on social and ethnic gaps in learning in Germany and United states will be presented. An outlook on future research opportunities will be given at the end of the talk.