Cultural stratification in the UK: Persistent gender and class differences in cultural voraciousness

SCI Honorary Researcher Tally Katz-Gerro co-published a new journal article with Oriel Sullivan in the Journal of Consumer Culture that adds to the literature on cultural stratification by revisiting cultural voraciousness, nearly two decades after it was first introduced as a measure of cultural participation designed to capture inequalities in the pace and variety of cultural activities.

Using the U.K. 2014–15 Time Use Survey, the authors compare measures of cultural voraciousness in the U.K. in 1998 and 2015, focusing in particular on the way cultural voraciousness is associated with both gender and class. They find that there is continuity over time in the patterns of relationship between cultural voraciousness, gender and class, which are not explained by income or hours worked.

While women at the bottom of the class scale are still the most disadvantaged in terms of unequal access to cultural participation, high-level managerial women now equal equivalent men in their voracious cultural participation. From this the authors derive the conclusion that not only is cultural voraciousness still useful in depicting cultural inequalities delineated by gender and class, and not only do gender and class gaps in cultural voraciousness persist over time, but also that there is evidence for accentuated class inequality over time in cultural voraciousness among men and among women.