Friday news roundup July 20, 2018

Open offices actually result in less collaboration among employees. A study found that participants spent 72% less time interacting face-to-face after the shift to an open office layout. At the same time, the shift to an open office significantly increased digital communication. The authors theorized that the lack of physical boundaries in the open office made constructing social barriers necessary.

A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found that incomes for single-parent families in the UK need to increase by 27%. Government benefit cuts are hitting lower-earning households in the UK, making it increasingly difficult for them to keep up with the cost of living.

Major strikes are planned across Israel this Sunday as workers protest a new law that essentially excludes LGBT couples from state-supported surrogate pregnancies. Previously only heterosexual married couples qualified and the new law now extends this to single women. Spain, on the other hand, has extended free fertility treatment to single women and lesbians.

New research has found that when wives earn more than their husbands, neither partner likes to admit it. In marriages where women earned more, women said, on average, that they earned 1.5% less than they actually did. Their husbands said they earned 2.9% more than they actually did.

Four in five experts cited in online news are men, according to an analysis conducted by the Centre for the Study of Media Communication and Power. The research analyzed a representative sample of all news articles published online across a seven day period by major news outlets including the BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Sky, Daily Mail, and many more. The imbalance is even greater for certain fields, such as foreign politics, and business and finance, where men make up almost nine out of ten expert sources.

Find related IZA World of Labor papers on demography, family, and gender.