Frances McGinnity

Frances McGinnity is an Associate Research Professor at the ESRI and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. She is joint coordinator of the research areas Social Inclusion & Equality and Migration, Integration & Demography at the ESRI, and a Senior Research Advisor for the European Migration Network (Ireland).  She received her doctorate from Nuffield College Oxford in 2001 and came to the ESRI in 2004 from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. Most of her research to date has examined labour market inequality, often from a comparative perspective. She is also interested in work-life balance, childcare, discrimination and migrant integration.

She is co-coordinator of a research programme on Human Rights and Equality, funded by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. This programme produces reports on topics such as discrimination, attitudes to migrants, inequality in housing, ethnicity and nationality in the Irish labour market and unpaid caring work, using a variety of data sources and research methods.

Dr McGinnity is also coordinator of a research programme on Integration and Equality for the Department of Justice and Equality. Research topics include the Monitoring Report on Integration, which focuses on the economic, social and cultural integration of migrants into Irish society; data needs for monitoring integration and the spatial segregation of migrants. She led the first field experiment on discrimination in recruitment in Ireland and collaborated with EU colleagues on a NORFACE project examining early socio-cultural integration patterns of migrants.

Another key research interest is in mothers’ employment, childcare and work-life balance. She co-edited a special issue of the US quality-of-life journal Social Indicators Research on work-life balance using the European Social Survey.  Recent studies have examined the patterns of childcare and the effects of different forms of care on children’s cognitive and socio-emotional outcomes, as well as the impact of childcare costs on maternal employment. As part of this work she was involved in the Edulife project which examined the effects of early education and childcare on social inequality across a range of countries.

Dr McGinnity is a a member of the international advisory board of the Nuffield Foundation funded research programme ‘Social Policy and Distributional Outcomes in a Changing Britain’; a member of the Management Committee of the European COST (Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action Group ‘Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities Survey data network’, and a lead author on the International Panel on Social Progress (Visit https://www.ipsp.org/ for more information).