Sander Wagner

“Measuring itself is a political act with political consequences” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/c...

we are working on some more research papers on the same data.

Do you see how 2 years after birth the penalty trajectory turns into a straight line? It stays that straight line up to t=10 if you calculate the 10 year trajectories (not in the paper, but we did it).

this (yours) is a fantastic article, that does many things that we don't. But thanks so much for the praise. It means a lot!

Andreas Filser (@filsa.bsky.social) 👨‍💻@Data Centre IAB @iabnews.bsky.social 🔎 parental leave,parents&labor market,sex ratios & demography ❤️‍🔥#rstats data work & dataviz, teaching stats + train travel 🚂 🔗 afilser.netlify.app | iab.de/m...

Finally let me praise the fantastic team of co-authors that got deep into the weeds of cross-national administrative data analysis with me and made this challenging visual exploration possible: filsa.bsky.social, Pascal Achard and Inga-Marie Amend.

And if you are an academic wondering what to cite when writing about the "strong link between motherhood penalties and gender inequality in the labour market" ... baah voilà (oder hier bitte!)

So if you are a policymaker interested in what to do about the gender earnings gap in your country/region: remember it is really strongly linked to how mothers do in the labour market after they have children!

But (!) the relationship between motherhood penalty and gender earnings gaps not only holda across borders. It is even stronger within countries.

Within each country, a region with higher motherhood penalties is very likely a region with a higher gender earnings gap (see coloured lines)

Then we calculated the gender earnings gap (capturing the difference in earnings between men and women among all employees) for the same regions.

Here you can see the map of the Nuts-2 gender earnings gap and the NUTS-2 motherhood penalties.

Look similar?

Harmonized administrative data allowed us to calculate regional motherhood earnings penalties for two (once three) very different countries.

How different?

None of the regional (thin lines - Nuts-2) motherhood penalties in France (abt 20%), East-Germany (abt 50%) or West-Germany (abt 70%) overlap.

New article out in @sociusjournal.bsky.social.

It shows how closely linked motherhood penalties 🤰📉 and gender inequalities 👨‍💼💰👩‍💼 are by studying many local labour markets.

Thread 👇

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Imagine being an economic historian and not having won a nobel yet...

i mean if you want absolute environmental disaster, moving the whole current world pop to semi-rural small scale agriculture (which seems to be the dream for some) would definitely do the trick.

yes on average, which pushes them in the other direction in terms of consumption patterns, but if you hold country stable at least urbans consume so much less energy, and if you control for income/wealth it probably gets even more extreme...

Not gonna get into the population size - environmental degradation arguments, but what really caught me off-guard in this nature correspondence was the call for reduced urbanization, when evidence clearly shows urban populations being less stressful to the environment. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

otoh i remember the multi-voice version of Buddenbrooks I listened to as a teen very fondly, because of the panoply of different German characters and accents that really shone that way.

😳

🤷‍♂️

British Journal of Sociology Conference Find out more about the BJS conference 2026, which will provide an in-person platform for academics across the discipline to advance their research.

Submit your paper to the British Journal of Sociology 2026 Conference!

The conference will showcase cutting-edge research across Sociology, providing a platform to discuss the most exciting developments in the field.

Submit your abstract by Monday 20 October 2025 ➡️ www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/br...

💯

Followup: Prevalance Map of the 2025 observations.

Study of Social Isolation in 159 countries between 2009-2024:

Social Isolation increased by 13,4% with the entire increase happening after the COVID pandemic in 2019 but continuing to increase since.

Low-income groups have much higher social isolation levels

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Abortion Access, Economic Hardship and Crime:

The paper uses changes in abortion rates due to changes in the distance to the closest abortion clinic after the enforcement of Texas HB-2 in 2013.

Less abortions led to more economic hardship and crime.
www.nber.org/papers/w34245

Guessing Game:

What does this graph show?

Society of Labor Economists (SoLE) Annual Conference will be May 1-2, 2026 in Denver, Colorado. Submission portal is now open! Deadline for submissions is October 31--don't forget to submit! It will be a great conference! (organized by me and @jrothst.bsky.social)

mailchi.mp/sole-jole/so...

🐵 www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

well... low bar to clear

The speed with which the political discourse moved from "we have to take migration concerns seriously" to "we have found a universally agreed upon scapegoat that we can blame all our governance shortcomings on" was incredibly fast and really deserves pushback.

This foreword to "Restoring Control Over the Immigration System" contains some outrageous statements.
The migration increase was driven by student visas. Have these tuition paying students truly done "incalculable damage" to the country?

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6821ae...

Book cover: the pursuit of laughter, essays, articles, reviews and diary of the most controversial Mitford sister. And it’s DIANA MOSLEY. Complete with a generic picture of a 1930s society belle’s face in pearls.

the marketing of this book is WILD once you see which Mitford it is

Good article on the diferences between profound and non-profound autism. Also goes into the problems for families with children with profound autism that stem from diagnosing this entire spectrum under one term. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/h...