Cultural capital and gender differences in health behaviours: a study on eating, smoking and drinking patterns

ABSTRACT

It is widely acknowledged that people with higher socioeconomic positions and women smoke less, avoid alcohol abuse, and eat more healthily. Yet far less is known about the interaction of socioeconomic status with gender, especially in the Italian context. Here we address this issue by employing Abel’s adaptation of Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory and Courtenay’s theory of gender construction and health. Using 2012 data from the Multipurpose survey on Daily Life, we first show that cultural capital is better than social class in predicting an adult’s compliance with health recommendations, although this does not hold true for alcohol intake. We then look at the interaction of gender with cultural capital measures in order to determine how gendered forms of consumption change with increasing levels of cultural capital. The results show that the gender gap diminishes at higher levels of cultural capital following a twofold pattern: most often men’s marginal benefit increases at a higher rate than that of women; however, we also find evidence that the gap diminishes because women start adopting unhealthy behaviours as their level of cultural resources increases. Overall, these findings indicate that cultural capital plays an important role in reconstructing gender role models.

KEYWORDS:

• Alcohol
• cultural capital
• gender
• health
• nutrition
• smoking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In this paper, we use the institutionalised (educational level) and the embodied (books read and participation to cultural activities) states as predictors of health behaviours because they together offer an analytical tool more complex than the educational level per se. However, it remains very difficult to disentangle the mechanisms underlying the effect of these dimensions, especially given their interdependence (Abel, 2007). As a tentative interpretation, one may suggest that the embodied state reflects behaviours related to the symbolic consumption of healthy food, especially in public circumstances, or, more generally, the exhibition of self-care; differently, educational credentials may be interpreted as the official knowledge on healthy behaviours which is channelled through the school and academic system.

2 Due to the existence of specific gender norms, it can be theoretically justified to expect reduced gender differences in health behaviours at higher levels of cultural capital. It is not straightforward, instead, to derive hypotheses on the role of economic resources, net of different endowments of cultural capital, in attenuating the gender gap. To corroborate our argument better, in the empirical section of the paper we briefly refer to additional models (available upon request) wherein the interactions between gender and all dimensions of cultural capital and gender and social class are simultaneously estimated.