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fork(2) [soylentnews.org] writes:

      Writing in Nature today (July 1), Elena Bozhkova [nature.com] reports on a paper [sagepub.com] by sociologists Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman which appeared on 23 June in American Sociological Review. She says, "Young people with parents in highly paid professions still take most of the jobs in science, an analysis of UK labour data suggests. But once they enter a science career, people from different backgrounds tend to earn similar wages, according to the study."

Sociologists have chronicled multiple ways in which the science community does not reflect the diversity of society -- including imbalances in gender, race and ethnicity. Studies often find, for example, that women and minorities face a 'glass ceiling' that prevents them from advancing to the top levels of their careers. Now, Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman, two sociologists at the London School of Economics, have looked at scientists through the prism of socioeconomic class, looking for evidence of a barrier to entry, or 'glass floor'.

      [...]

      [Looking at data from the UK Labour Force Survey collected in from July to September 2014] their analysis included almost 44,000 people between the ages of 23 and 69, around 5,000 of whom were high-status professionals, including 256 scientists.

      Laurison and Friedman found that if people from a working-class background get a high-paying professional job -- such as law, finance and medicine -- they earn about 17% less than people from privileged backgrounds. But for those in science professions, there is no difference in earnings.

      [...]

      Friedman says that he and Laurison have recently repeated their analysis with twice as many data, adding statistics from 2014 and 2015, and found highly similar results. In follow-up work, the authors also looked at data from the French Labour Force Survey. "The science-specific results in both France and the United Kingdom are strikingly similar," Friedman says.

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