Frances McGinnity

Associate Research Professor

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. Her core research interests are in equality, diversity and discrimination, migrant integration, social attitudes, work-life balance and labour market processes, in Ireland and from a comparative perspective. Most of her research is based on large-scale survey data but she has also conducted qualitative research and experiments.

Dr McGinnity is coordinator of a major research programme on Integration and Equality for the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. She has led a Monitoring Report on Integration since 2010, other reports have considered residential segregation of migrants; housing and family among migrants; migrant children’s development; wages and working conditions; measures to combat racial discrimination and the response of the population in Ireland to migration. Dr McGinnity also collaborated with EU colleagues on a NORFACE project examining early socio-cultural integration patterns of migrants in Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands and Germany.

She has also been involved in coordinating and conducting research on equality and human rights, funded by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. This has included topics such as the experience of discrimination, attitudes to diversity, unpaid caring work, decent work and adequate housing, using a variety of data sources and research methods. A recent project with ESRI colleagues funded by the National Disability Authority uses experimental methods to examine attitudes to disability in Ireland. 

Recent work funded under the joint partnership between the ESRI and the Shared Island Unit of the Department of the Taoiseach. has compared Ireland and Northern Ireland. Topics have included comparisons of migrant integration, social and political attitudes, early care and education and gender equality on the island. 

Dr McGinnity is currently Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion at LSE, was a member of the international advisory board of the Nuffield Foundation funded research programme ‘Social Policy and Distributional Outcomes in a Changing Britain’. She was lead author on discrimination for the International Panel on Social Progress (Visit https://www.ipsp.org/ for more information). is currently a member of the IMISCOE network standing committee on race, racism and discrimination. •