Social inequality: exclusion and discrimination as distinct mechanisms

Overview

Social inequality, social exclusion and cycle of deprivation.

What you need to know

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Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What is meant by social inequality?

   Model answer

   Social inequality is the unequal distribution between groups of resources, opportunities and outcomes, including income and wealth, housing quality and security, health and life expectancy, education, employment, safety, mobility and political voice. What makes it social inequality rather than individual difference is that the pattern follows group membership, such as ethnicity, gender, race, religion, sexuality or social class, rather than falling randomly. It almost always has a geography, because groups are unevenly distributed between regions and between neighbourhoods.

2. 2

   What is social exclusion?

   Model answer

   Social exclusion is the process by which individuals or groups are shut out from full participation in the society they live in. It has several dimensions: economic exclusion from work and adequate income; service exclusion from health care, education, banking, digital access or transport; social exclusion from networks and community life; political exclusion from having a voice in decisions; and spatial exclusion, where living in a particular place restricts what is reachable. It is more than low income: it is cumulative, self-reinforcing, and typically concentrated in particular neighbourhoods.

3. 3

   What is discrimination, and what forms does it take?

   Model answer

   Discrimination is treating a person less favourably because of a characteristic such as their ethnicity, race, gender, religion, sexuality, disability, age or class background. Direct discrimination is explicit less favourable treatment, such as refusing an applicant a tenancy because of their name or accent. Indirect discrimination occurs where a rule applied to everyone puts one group at a particular disadvantage without good justification, such as a requirement that disproportionately excludes one group. Discrimination can be individual, in the choices of a landlord or employer, or institutional, built into the routine procedures of an organisation whether or not anyone intends it.

4. 4

   Explain the difference between social exclusion and discrimination.

   Model answer

   They are different kinds of thing. Discrimination is an act or a form of treatment, and therefore a mechanism: someone or some institution treats a group less favourably. Social exclusion is a condition and a process: a group ends up unable to participate fully in society. Discrimination is one important cause of exclusion, but not the only one, because exclusion can also arise from poverty, poor transport, closure of local services, ill health, caring responsibilities, low literacy or lack of language. Equally, discrimination does not always produce exclusion, since a group may face discrimination while remaining economically and socially included. The practical point is that removing discrimination through law does not by itself remove exclusion, which is why anti-discrimination policy is usually paired with area-based and service-based measures.

5. 5

   Explain how social exclusion becomes geographical.

   Model answer

   Because disadvantaged households are concentrated by the housing market and by housing allocation into particular estates and inner areas, and because those areas then have poorer access to what people need: fewer and less frequent bus services, longer journeys to hospitals and colleges, fewer full-range food shops so shopping is dearer, fewer bank branches and cash machines, weaker broadband uptake, and less good-quality green space. Employers may also treat a postcode as a signal, so the area's reputation itself becomes a barrier. Exclusion is therefore experienced as a property of a place as well as of a household.

6. 6

   What is a cycle of deprivation, and how would you describe it as a diagram?

   Model answer

   It is a self-reinforcing loop in which disadvantage in one area of life produces disadvantage in another. Drawn as a circle of linked boxes with arrows running one way round: low income leads to poor housing in a low-cost area; poor housing and a stressed environment lead to poorer health and to schools with high turnover and low attainment; low attainment leads to insecure, low-paid work or unemployment; that returns to low income. Additional arrows can be added for weak local job markets, poor transport and area stigma feeding into the same loop. The point of the diagram is that intervening at any single box is unlikely to break the cycle, which is why regeneration schemes usually attack several at once.

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