Journal Article

Graduate and professional education play an increasingly important role in economic inequality and elite formation in the United States, but sociologists have not subjected stratification in and through graduate education to the same level of scrutiny recently applied to undergraduate and subbaccalaureate education. In this review, we discuss how prominent stratification theories might be extended to studies of the role of graduate and professional education, and we review research about stratification at junctures along student pathways into and through postbaccalaureate education to the labor market. Especially in doctoral and professional education, we find persistent stratification, including pronounced educational inheritance and disparities in participation and degree attainment by race/ethnicity and gender. We propose future directions for inquiry, highlighting unanswered questions and conceptual issues concerning how the field of and pathways through postbaccalaureate education contribute to social stratification.

Special education is an approach to schooling that draws significant critique. Scholars often identify special education as a system vulnerable to and complicit in racial, class, and disability segregation, particularly segregation enacted and rationalized through the structural organization of schools and programs. Employing data from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), Canada's largest public education system, this article highlights key policy decisions around special education. Controlling for achievement, results reveal significant disparities in access to secondary programming critical to postsecondary education.

This paper proposes a new measure of skill mismatch to be applied to the recent OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). The measure is derived from a formal theory and combines information about skill proficiency, self-reported mismatch and skill use. The theoretical foundations underling this measure allow identifying minimum and maximum skill requirements for each occupation and to classify workers into three groups: the well-matched, the under-skilled and the over-skilled. The availability of skill use data further permits the computation of the degree of under- and over-usage of skills in the economy. The empirical analysis is carried out using the first round of the PIAAC data, allowing comparisons across skill domains, labour market statuses and countries.

The purpose of this study is to draw on feminist ethics of care theory to examine motives for accessing a women‐focused, small business programme (Centre). Perceived differences between women‐focused and other small business advisory agencies are discussed. An online survey captured verbatim responses from 212 respondents. Qualitative data were subjected to content analysis using NVivo8.Most respondents were growth‐oriented, well educated and employed prior to start‐up. Clients employed the Centre for three reasons, including acquisition of managerial, social capital and gender‐related motives. The Centre was perceived as being “different” to other agencies such that staff implicitly understood their needs as businesswomen, services were targeted specifically to women and clients felt empowered and comfortable seeking business advice in an inviting, low risk learning environment. Findings contradict studies and argument that targeted (gender‐based) programming offers few advantages.Future research might investigate how “gendered” client motives and learning needs are reflected in mainstream and gender‐based entrepreneurship policy and programme design. The geographic scope is limited to Nova Scotia (eastern Canada).The study helps to explain observations that women‐focused small business training centres are modifying mandates from a focus on start‐up to growth, modifications that reflected client aspirations.The study provides insights about the genderedness (Calás and Smircich) of small business programming and helps to define feminine ethics of care within the small firm training context.

Yukon, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, Canada's three Northern territories, are characterised as the most northerly permanently inhabited regions in the world, and the least populous regions of Canada. It is not yet clear, what if any gender-related issues stymie the growth of female-owned Northern Canadian enterprises. This study presents a perspective on the contexts of, and challenges facing, female entrepreneurs in Northern Canada. To inform this work, the study draws on previous research, analyses of survey data, and interviews with 11 key informants conversant with entrepreneurship in Northern Canada. Findings are used to advance questions for future research about women's Indigenous (in the Canadian context, Aboriginal) and non-Indigenous (non-Aboriginal) entrepreneurship in Northern Canada.

According to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST, 2012), there is a need to produce one million more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) graduates in the U.S. over the next decade. Thus, more students must be recruited into and retained in STEM degrees of study. Because faculty are considered influential in students' choices to pursue and remain in STEM disciplines, we interviewed university STEM faculty in order to identify their perceptions of student recruitment and retention in STEM fields. Our data indicate that faculty are generally unaware of or not worried about the need to produce additional STEM graduates. Additionally, faculty seem to be unaware of the actions they might take to positively influence STEM recruitment and retention at the post-secondary level. Here, we specifically discuss faculty perceptions of (1) the gap between the number of STEM graduates and the number of STEM workers available for STEM-related jobs, (2) why students may not be going into or remaining in STEM fields, and (3) their own roles in recruiting and retaining students in STEM fields.

In earlier work (Oreopoulos 2009), thousands of resumes were sent in response to online job postings across Toronto to investigate why Canadian immigrants struggle in the labour market. The findings suggested significant discrimination by name ethnicity and city of experience. This follow-up study focuses more on better understanding exactly why this type of discrimination occurs, that is, whether this discrimination can be attributed to underlying concerns about worker productivity or simply prejudice and whether the behaviour is likely conscious or not. We examine callback rates from resumes sent to online job postings across multiple occupations in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Substantial differences in callback rates arise again from simply changing an applicant's name. Combining all three cities, resumes with English-sounding names are 35 percent more likely to receive callbacks than resumes with Indian or Chinese names. This is remarkably consistent with earlier findings from Oreopoulos (2009) for Toronto in better economic circumstances. If name-based discrimination arises from language and social skill concerns, we should expect to observe less discrimination when 1) including other attributes related to these skills on the resume, such as language proficiency and active extracurricular activities; 2) looking at occupations that depend less on these skills, like computer programming and data entry; and 3) listing a name more likely to be an applicant born in Canada, like a Western European name compared to an Indian or Chinese name. In all three cases, we do not find these patterns. We then asked recruiters to explain why they believed name discrimination occurs in the labour market. Overwhelmingly, they responded that employers often treat a name as a signal that an applicant may lack critical language or social skills for the job, which contradicts the conclusions from our quantitative analysis. Taken together, the contrasting findings are consistent with a model of subconscious statistical discrimination, where employers justify name and immigrant discrimination based on language skill concerns, but incorrectly overemphasize these concerns without taking into account offsetting characteristics listed on the resume. Pressure to avoid bad hires exacerbates these effects, as does the need to review resumes quickly. Masking names when deciding who to interview, while considering better ways to discern foreign language ability, may help improve immigrants chances for labour market success.