Kate E. Pickett

University of York
Professor of Epidemiology, Department of Health Sciences

Trained in biological anthropology at Cambridge, nutritional sciences at Cornell and epidemiology at UC-Berkeley, Kate Pickett is Professor of Epidemiology at the University of York, where she also leads the PhD programme in Health Sciences.
Kate's research focuses on the social determinants of health, particularly the influences of such factors as income inequality, social class, neighborhood context and ethnic density on such varied outcomes as mortality and morbidity, teenage birth, violent crime, obesity, social mobility and health-related behaviors.
Kate is a UK National Institute for Health Research Career Scientist, and a Fellow of the RSA. She is co-author with Richard Wilkinson, of The Spirit Level, chosen as one of the Top Ten Books of the Decade by the New Statesman and winner of the 2010 Bristol Festival of Ideas Book Prize. The Spirit Level as sold more than 100,000 copies in the UK and is available in 18 foreign editions. Kate is a director of The Equality Trust.

Working Group

Health Inequality (HI)
Measuring and Interpreting Inequality (MIE)

Additional Information

Homepage: https://hsciweb.york.ac.uk/research/public/Staff.aspx?ID=1197

Research Interests:

I direct a programme of research designed to test an integrated explanation of the social determinants of population health and health inequalities. One of the key problems in this area has been to understand the importance of the direct effects of material factors on health, compared to the psychosocial effects of social status differentiation. However recently, research on the effects of income inequality on health is providing strong evidence for the damaging effects of greater social differentiation. My research involves testing the primacy of social differentiation versus material factors by studying group density effects - where members of particular groups are healthier when they live in areas with higher concentrations of people like themselves. Another factor to bear in mind from research on health inequalities is that groups who suffer worse health also suffer from a wider set of problems linked to their low social status, such as low educational performance, and a range of behavioural and social problems that increase the risk of poor health. The clustering of ill health and other social problems seems to be confirmed by recent work showing that income inequality is not only associated with worse physical health but also with a broad range of other problems, such as mental illness, teenage births, low education, and obesity. The precursors of many of these problems seem to lie in early childhood. Another set of projects focuses on child development, examining family and neighbourhood social contexts in relation to developmental markers determined before adulthood and studying international differences in child poverty and national income inequality in relation to developmental precursors of low social mobility and later poor health

Related Papers:

Wilkinson RG, and Pickett KE. 2009
The consequences of relative deprivation
Annual Review of Sociology, 35:493-511

Pickett KE and Wilkinson RG 2008
People like us: The effects of ethnic group density
Ethnicity and Health, 13: 321-334