3 Inequality and interconnection

Video 1, that you watched at the beginning of this course, provided a taster on the way that travel, transport and movement can provide interesting subject matter for social scientists. In this section, you will watch a longer video, which explores these ideas in more detail. The video also tells a story about inequality and interconnection. These are two key ideas that social scientists regularly use to understand the social world. Thinking about inequality and interconnection can help you to reflect broadly and deeply about social topics and can give you ways to think about the world that might not, at first, be completely obvious.

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A birds eye view photograph of the ‘The Wall of Shame’ in Lima, a kilometers-long barrier of concrete and barbed wire.

Inequality refers to the uneven access to or allocation of resources or opportunities within a society. This can result in advantage or disadvantage between individuals or groups.

For instance, in many countries, statistics indicate that women experience inequality in the workplace, where they are paid less on average than men for undertaking the same work. Inequality can also appear in the form of differing opportunities. For example, research indicates that women in Latin America obtain higher educational qualifications than men and yet have much lower labour force participation (Berniell, Fernandez & Krutikova, 2024). Inequality is also evident in the UK where research indicates that people who attend private or fee-paying schools are more likely to secure a range of high-status and high-paying careers, such as law, politics, acting or sport (Sutton Trust, 2019).

Interconnection refers to instances where two or more things are linked, connected or interact in some way.

An example of this is the fact that the education and prison systems are distinct – they are run by different people, largely concerned with different age ranges, and governed by different laws. However, on closer inspection, the people who end up in prison are far more likely to have struggled and perhaps been failed in various ways by the education system. In this way, these two seemingly distinct systems share some connection. You may come to notice that the more you look for interconnections between any two apparently distinct things, the more you can find.

Although inequality and interconnection are independent and distinct ideas, in many instances they overlap and inform each another. Indeed, the example of the interconnection between the education and prison systems demonstrates this overlap: inequality in one part of society is interconnected with another, where it is then revealed that significant numbers of people in prison also had poor schooling outcomes.