A (slightly) Depressing Look at European Diversity

When you wake up in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror, what do you see? A woman? A Black man? A Christian? A queer person? If you’ve answered “a human being”, it means you consider yourself to be a generic person, with no race, no class, and no gender. And you are most likely a white male: privilege is invisible to those who have it.

I was feeling uncharacteristically happy, so I decided to dampen by mood a bit by looking at these wonderful statistics from the European Union on discrimination. Admittedly, the data is almost 2 years old, however I imagine attitudes would not have shifted massively over the period.

The demography of minorities

How diverse is Europe, really? The following charts show the percentage of survey respondents that consider themselves part of a minority in their respective countries. I have graphed all to the same scale, to make the statistics more easily comparable across different diversity groups. We can immediately note that race and religion diversity are much higher than the prevalence of different sexual orientations or disabilities (on average by a factor of 3x).

I was interested in comparing the prevalence of minority groups to the perception of discrimination in every country. I grouped the perception of discrimination in quartiles, and charted it on the top: the red dots indicate countries in the bottom quartile, that is, countries residents believe to be quite discriminatory. The green dots on the other hand mark countries in the top quartile, that is, countries that are more accepting. Are perception of discrimination and diversity by type correlated? I checked with a quick regression: the R^2 are very low, sub 5%, however there appear to be a couple of patterns:

• People could be reluctant to disclose their belonging to a minority in countries where discrimination is high. If this were true, we should observe higher prevalence of “concealable” minorities (we can quite easily hide homosexuality, you cannot hide the colour of your skin) in more accepting countries. We can see a higher prevalence of “green dots” to the right in the sexual orientation chart: this means more queers in more tolerant countries, substantiating the point. (It could also be that sexual minorities move to more tolerant countries, thus inflating the numbers…).
• Higher prevalence of diversity could lead to higher acceptance of such diversity. This seems to be the case for sexual orientation and disability (more green dots to the right), however, worryingly, not in the case of race: a lot of red dots in countries where there is a sizeable ethnic minority. I cannot assess whether this is an indication of a backlash against recent immigration or not without trend data however.

A survey on hypocrisy

Have a look at the following tables. These show the average score people reported when answering the following two questions:

• Regardless of whether you are actually working or not, using a scale from 1 to 10, how comfortable you would feel if one of your colleagues at work belonged to each of the following groups?

• Regardless of whether you have children or not, using a scale from 1 to 10, how comfortable you would feel if one of your children was in a love relationship with a person from each of the following groups?

I highlighted scores below 5 in red (ie. not comfortable) and scores below 6.5 in yellow (ie. slightly comfortable). People may be broadly accepting to work with folks who are different from them, however they are clearly not ok with their kids dating a member of a minority. Especially if they happen to be Trans, Muslim or Gay. ‘nuff said. I think the percentage of people who are not ok with one of their children dating a same sex partner is even more problematic, as parents are implicitly saying they could not accept that their kid was gay if they found out.

Kissing in public is gross*

*If you are Gay

How comfortable would you feel, on a scale of 1 to 10, if a couple were showing affection in public (e.g. kissing or holding hands)? On average, Europeans say 7.5. But if the couple happens to be two girls, we go down to 5.8, and if it’s two guys, 5.5. I wanted to compare the variance in percentage terms, as the simple difference would not take into account the fact that in some countries any type of PDA may be considered inappropriate.

The map above shows the percentage difference for gay vs straight in different Europeans counties: the higher the percentage (the darker the country), the less acceptable it is to kiss your boyfriend in public if you happen to be a guy. You might want to check it out before deciding on your next holiday destination, if you are queer and plan on travelling with your significant other…

You got a friend in me

Does having a “minority friend” (man, that sounds awful) make you more accepting? Evidence is mixed. The table below shows the R^2 output for the regressions where the independent variable is the share of survey respondents who say they have a friend who belongs to a minority group and the dependent variable is one of the following:

• Is discrimination against [appropriate minority group] rare?
• Would you feel comfortable if the highest elected political position in your country was a member of [appropriate minority group]?
• Should school lessons and material include information about diversity in terms of [appropriate minority group]?

I highlighted the cells with different colours depending on whether the slope coefficient was negative (inverse relationship) or positive (direct relationship), and checked if the slope was significant.

• When considering perception of discrimination, it looks like having a “minority friend” will not impact positively. On the contrary. For the two cases where the slope is significant, the reverse is true: having a minority friend will lead you to believe discrimination in your country is more widespread. Maybe it’s because you realize how much worse the rest of society is treating your friend compared to how they are treating you?
• Things look rosier for the other two statistics: in countries where more people have a friend who has a different ethnic background, sexual orientation, gender identity or religion believing that schools should teach diversity and that a gay or Buddhist president would not be such a bad thing is more common. (Or it could just be that more open people just tend to have more diverse friends…)

Bonus point: Do people who live in countries where it is common to have a more diverse group of friends feel more satisfied with their life? Looks like they do! Especially if their friend happens to be gay (see chart below). Guess the whole GBF thing actually has some merits (¬‿¬)

So what?

I’m no statistician, these are simple observations gathered from the data and I have not controlled for any other variable while coming up with my conclusions. There are a myriad of different issues that may impact the outcome of the analysis (demographic and social composition in the different countries, openness and willingness to reply truthfully to a survey, age, …) however I do believe the conclusions are relevant and important. The data shows we are still living in a society that is not as accepting as we might want it to be, and sometimes, living in a large city like London, it is easy to forget that there are still places in Europe where whoever is different from the majority still faces discrimination. There is some hope though: more visibility, especially through friendship and representation in the media, can help change things. Let’s hope this will continue to be the case in the future and let’s look forward to when it will not be necessary to have surveys such as this.

God and Gender

It is not that uncommon to hear people referencing the link between religion and the treatment of women, and usually the two things are not positively correlated. I wanted to check whether or not this stereotype stands up to scrutiny. And to data. This one’s going to be short (but not so sweet). Let’s have a look, shall we?

The Sources

I decided to use three different indices to see if the findings were consistent across a number of measures of inequality. Here is a handy dandy little table with the data sources I used, along with a brief description of each index:

Index	Publisher	Description
GGGR	World Economic Forum	This index focuses on – gaps rather than levels (for example, the Index measures the size of the gap between male and female enrolment rates, but not for overall levels of education). – outcome rather than input variables (for example indicators related to country-specific policies, rights or culture, factors considered “inputs”, are not included). – measuring gender equality rather than women’s empowerment (rewards when outcomes for women equal those for men, but neither reward nor penalize cases in which women are outperforming men)
GII	UNDP	The GII is an inequality index. It shows the loss in potential human development due to disparity between female and male achievements in empowerment and economic status. Overall, the GII reflects how women are disadvantaged in these dimensions
GDI	UNDP	The GDI measures differences between male and female achievements health, measured by female and male life expectancy at birth; education, measured by female and male expected years of schooling for children and female and male mean years of schooling for adults ages 25 and older; and equitable command over economic resources, measured by female and male estimated earned income
Religiosity index	WIN – Gallup	A survey by WIN/Gallup International which explores religious beliefs of over 66.000 people in 68 countries across the world.

 

The Data

The world is God’s playground. At least, that is what the Win/Gallup pool data shows. On average, 60% of the population in any one country is religious; however there are sizeable differences between nations. The least religious countries are China, where only 9% of the population say they believe in God, and Japan (13%). Compare this to Thailand, where 98% of the population is religious and where your religion is written on your ID card, and Nigeria, where 97% of the population is made up of believers.

The prevalence of religious beliefs does not appear to be clustered geographically. However developed regions do tend to have lower levels of religiosity overall, although this is not the case for all countries. For example, Italy or Greece have quite a high proportion of believers, at 70% and 73% of the population respectively, while some developing countries have a lower level: take Estonia or China for example, where the figures are 28% and 9%.

Since all indices are measured on a scale, I decided to rebase them to 1. For example, I assume the country with the lowest score in religiosity to be a 0, and the one with the highest to be 100. I then scale the values for all countries.

If we analyse the data distributions (see charts above), religiosity seems to be pretty evenly distributed across the spectrum, while GII and GDI, the two UNDP indicators, present a skew towards positive values. Of the tree gender inequality indicators, the GGR is the one whose distribution most resembles a normal one. The values for the three indices have been rebased to 1, with higher values indicating lower gender disparity. I used simple (that is, not rebased) religiosity data for this chart. Thus we can say that, for example, there are 11 countries where between 20 and 30% of the population believes in God.

The analysis

I have about 65 data points for each of the indices, the data looks to me fairly distributed, there are no obvious extreme outliers skewing the results. I simply run a regression with religiosity as the independent variable and one of the inequality measures as the independent variable.

The findings are consistent: the higher the religiosity, the lower the country scores in terms of gender equality. The power of the regression as measured by the R^2 is quite high.

I was brought up catholic, however I now consider myself a flaming atheist. I think everybody should be entitled to believe in whatever they want, however belief systems should be kept out of social and political life, and religion should not play a part in defining laws nor have any bearings on how people who do not believe live their lives. It can be hard to disentangle the effects of religion from culture and traditions, however I think that such efforts are warranted, especially if we want our society to be pluralistic, open and accepting.

With my opinion of religion out of the way, let’s have a look at the results of this analysis. Correlation does not imply causation, however it is interesting to note the existence and the strength of negative relationship between the variables. It is also worth noting that the correlation is present when using all three of the indices, and albeit the power of the relationship varies, all the correlation coefficients are statistically significant. From looking at the charts, we can say that higher religious prevalence in a country is correlated with higher gender inequality. I will let you draw your own conclusions from this. Over and out.