Many young employees of museums, art centres and galleries, libraries and publishing houses move up the career ladder fairly fast, yet workplace success comes at a cost, forcing them to work beyond normal hours and outside formal job descriptions. Nevertheless, employees of cultural institutions are prepared to make the extra effort to help their organisations survive, according to Margarita Kuleva, lecturer at the Department of Sociology, HSE campus in St. Petersburg.

By choosing education for their children, parents tend to perpetuate social inequalities. While educated middle-class parents invest in their children's future by selecting the best possible school and becoming actively involved in the educational process, working-class families often feel they cannot afford to choose and instead, send children to the nearest school, expecting them to make it on their own, according to Larisa Shpakovskaya, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, HSE Campus in St. Petersburg.

Overall, Russians tend to be satisfied with their country's health care system, particularly when they do not need to deal with it; however, those with recent first-hand experience of healthcare often complain about the lack of professionalism and the decline in free medical services, according to Sergey Shishkin, Head of HSE's Department of Health Care Administration and Economy, and Natalia Kochkina and Marina Krasilnikova, sociologists with the Levada Centre, in their paper Health Care Service Availability and Quality as Assessed by the Russian Public.

Decisions relating to student dropout often resemble a trial with students as defendants and teachers as prosecutors and judges. This approach can create barriers between students and staff and raise the issue of the university's mission, according to Ivan Gruzdev, Evgeny Terentiev and Elena Gorbunova of the HSE’s Internal Monitoring Center.

Higher education cuts the risk of poverty by more than half, according to Alina Pishnyak and Daria Popova, leading researchers at the HSE Centre for Studies of Income and Living Standards. Their findings reveal that the household incomes of families where all adults are university-educated stand at 20% above the average, and conversely, in families where none of the adults hold a degree, living standards tend to be below average by a quarter.

Age boundaries are diminishing fast and do not influence people’s lives as much as before. Nevertheless, age remains an important factor in social interaction. Age self-identification for women is closely related to their appearances, which is why beauty remains one of the main self-investment projects for women. These are the conclusions drawn by researchers from the HSE Centre for Youth Studies (CYS) in St. Petersburg as part of a project* entitled ‘Age under Construction: Age Construction by Girls and Young Women’.

Free legal services are generally available in Russia, but their quality varies widely. Court-appointed lawyers tend to be less knowledgeable and competent than those who offer their services pro bono for reasons such as social responsibility or professional reputation, according to a study by Anton Kazun, Junior Research Fellow at the HSE International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development.

The politicization and commercialization of health issues in today’s Western culture have led to growing healthism – a peremptory idea of self-preserving behaviour. This approach criticizes everything that fails to fit into the glamorous standards of a beautiful, young and slim body. In extreme forms, healthism is close to eugenics, which selects a ‘correct’ heredity. But even simple concerns about the ‘standards’ of physical condition may provoke hypercorrection, such as surgery on a healthy body, said Evgenia Golman, lecturer at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences Department of General Sociology, in her article published in the Journal of Social Policy Studies.

Over the next 20 years, death rates among working age Russian men are expected to drop by a third due to a change in alcohol consumption preferences – namely, the decreasing popularity of vodka, according to Yevgeny Yakovlev, Assistant Professor at the HSE Department of Applied Economics, and Lorenz Kueng, Assistant Professor of Finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. 

Abusive parents, internet and TV violence, and social exclusion are all contributing to growing violence in schools, with verbal aggression being the most common type of aggressive behaviour among young people, according to Irina Sizova, Head of the Sociology Laboratory at the HSE Branch in Nizhny Novgorod.

A predominance of women on a company's boards of directors can lead to a loss of flexibility in governance. Yet in times of change, for example during periods of rapid growth or crisis, women can make better leaders than men: they are more willing to take risks and tend to find more unconventional solutions, according to a report 'The Impact of Gender Diversity of the Board and Ownership Structure on Corporate Performance: Evidence from Western Europe' by HSE researchers Tatiana Ratnikova and Dmitry Gavrilov.

Social workers tend to believe that society underestimates the complexity of their mission and fails to fully appreciate the gift of caring and compassion that they offer their clients. Experts warn that social work may lead to burnout, unless practitioners are taught the skills of managing their emotions in dealing with clients and equipped with standard algorithms facilitating their 'emotional work' and thus helping to alleviate stress, according to Olga Simonova, Deputy Head of the HSE Department of General Sociology.