Women and Careers

Transnational Studies in Public Policy and Employment Equity

Marilee Reimer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351799096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Women in Business
• Index: Business

The unifying theme of Women and Careers is women's educational and employment success, with the objective of profiling supportive public policy in global contexts from Atlantic Canada to Western Europe, Australia and China. It takes up the career processes of women from marginalized groups who have been underrepresented historically: women who are the first generation to graduate from university in both Atlantic Canada (New Brunswick) and China and rural women from the eastern most Canadian province (Newfoundland and Labrador). It examines the situation of marginalized Protestant women in Belfast, Northern Ireland, who benefit from a European Union program that supports their political and social involvement in an economically underdeveloped region and previously unimagined in a country once wrought by sectarian violence. A policy analysis of an Atlantic Canadian region after the dominant forestry industry leaves takes up policy options and women's possible agency should economic support return for small business networks and social enterprise, e.g., credit unions, food and social housing cooperatives. Proactive employment equity programs in Finland's Applied Science Institute and Switzerland's Forestry Institute provide cutting edge examples of diversity and inclusion policies in education and academia. A comparative study of Canada and Australia of two leading public service employers illustrates incremental outcomes for women managers and professionals but raises the ultimate question of the pace and necessary political will required to remove barriers to gender equality in countries with major gender inequities.

Women and Careers examines a series of institutional contexts transnationally and the impact of policies, programs and economic re-structuring on careers outcomes. It displays the latest research on the topic and will be of interest both to students at an advanced level, academics, reflective practitioners, and diversity managers. It addresses the topics with regard to women's education and employment and will interest researchers, academics and policymakers in the fields of women's employment and career studies, diversity programs, organization studies, development policy, gender studies and globalization.

Part 1
Transnational Studies of Careers, Programmes and Policies

Introduction to Part 1

Marilee Reimer

This first section of this book includes five transnational studies of women students from relatively marginalized backgrounds—rural and mostly lower-income families, where parents do not themselves have post-secondary education. Three studies are set in Atlantic Canada (Reimer, Bourgeois, Cassin), one is set in China (Lu) and one is set in Northern Ireland (Hodgett).

Each study addresses critical questions around how women navigate post-secondary educational opportunities, the choices they make about areas of study and future career and life chances.

The research is timely. The broader context is one in which the value of post-secondary education, particularly in liberal arts, is in doubt. While the enrolment of women in post-secondary education has been increasing everywhere, tuition costs have risen and financial returns have fallen as more graduates compete in shrinking job markets. The prevailing neo-liberal view of post-secondary education, made explicit in the Newfoundland Government’s White Paper, is instrumental: the point of education is to prepare students for the new knowledge economy, ideally focussed around STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The route to gender equity in incomes is most readily achieved by promoting science education for women. The counter view, favoured by the theorists Pierre Bourdieu, Paulo Freire and Amartya Sen, is that an education in liberal arts is more valuable than one in STEM studies because the liberal arts promote a broader range of human capabilities—ones that add to quality of life, happiness and community building skills. The studies included in this section explore how their informants themselves assess the value of post-secondary education, the choices they made and the measures they consider most important. From their perspective—is an education in liberal arts ‘worth the money’?

Marilee Reimer’s research (Chapter 1: Atlantic Canadian Women University Graduates: Creative Career Strategies for First Generation Women) begins with the hypothesis that students might have internalized an instrumental view of liberal arts and that better-informed parents who themselves had post-secondary education would encourage their daughters to specialize early, in preparation for a postgraduate professional degree. Other students might find themselves triply disadvantaged, unfamiliar with how universities operate, fearful of debt, combining their studies with part-time jobs and more likely to graduate without necessary prerequisites for professional advancement. These findings were correct in some respects but also surprisingly wrong in that the non-specialist students felt happy with the work that they eventually found and were successful and appreciated by their employers.

Monique Bourgeois (Chapter 2: Gendered Choices in Post-Secondary Education—Math and Science or Liberal Arts? A Study of Women Students from Rural Newfoundland) similarly found that women students from rural Newfoundland communities commonly held vague and unfocussed ideas about future work opportunities yet felt optimistic and happy about their future life chances and valued the sense of intellectual freedom that liberal arts gave them to think beyond the narrow world views of other women in their rural home communities.

Female students in Lu’s study (Chapter 3: Postgraduate Transitions in Transforming China: Exploring Lived Experiences of First Generation Female Students in Two Chinese Universities), located in Northwest China, expressed the highest level of concern about their career chances. Half of the 20 students in the study had graduated with no immediate job prospects. They were well aware that they faced multiple challenges as females in a culture that overtly favoured males; as graduates in a decade during which there had been a sevenfold increase in the number of students pursuing higher education; and as there had been a sudden steep rise in tuition fees that hit rural, poor and female students the hardest as well as a steep decline in the job market following the global economic recession of 2009. Yet none of the students expressed doubts about the value of their choices and the hardships they endured in pursuing higher education.

The two studies by Susan Hodgett and Marguerite Cassin, set in Northern Ireland and rural Atlantic Canada, respectively, are markedly different from the first three in that they focus not on university students but on women who occupy marginalized social status. Hodgett’s (Chapter 4: Towards the Good Society: Expanding Women’s Capabilities through Community-Education and European Social Policy in Northern Ireland) respondents are women who participated in community-based adult education projects sponsored by the European Union in communities that rank close to the bottom on measures of numeracy, literacy, poverty, ill health and mental trauma caused by years of sectarian conflict. It is this study, however, that develops the strongest measures of the value of education beyond simple economic indicators. These measures focus on the subjective well-being of participants, assessed through stories they tell about how they feel empowered to build their communities, create alliances with women across the sectarian divide, promote discussion, agree on targets and overcome opposition from administration to achieve positive changes in their communities and support each other in challenging domestic and sexualized violence. Hodgett’s study leaves no doubt about the power of community-based adult education to enhance women’s capabilities.

Cassin’s study (Chapter 5: Considering Gender in View of Community and Economic Development Practices in Rural Atlantic Canada) investigates how agency is institutionalized, sequenced and enters people’s lives. Economic development public policy and practice is examined for how it shapes changes in gender relations in rural industrial communities in crisis. Cassin illustrates the agency and structuring of public policy implementation as it sets new conditions for politics, community life, jobs, opportunities and gender relations when large industrial businesses close in rural communities. She uses her institutional ethnography of northern New Brunswick to show the changes, opportunities and responsibilities of women as the impact of job losses, social dislocation and political decline reshapes this region. She then speculates on the potential of social enterprise as a community economic development policy and as part of the future participation of women in jobs, community organizations and local governance. Existing literature generally characterizes economic decline in passive terms. The focus of discussion is how local people must and do adapt to changes not of their own making; it documents a decline in community confidence and capacity, and a shift in gender equality. Cassin’s work, like Hodgett’s, shifts focus from decline to considering individual and women’s agency in revitalizing local economies. Women have the potential to assume roles in the context of rural industrial decline. Early indications suggest interest in creating social enterprises in their communities—enterprises that can effectively combine business and social goals. In the process, women are also actively restructuring gender relations. Cassin observes that economic development agencies might explore social enterprise for its potential in revitalizing community and fostering equality-oriented and inclusive institutions, and in view of such investigation consider economic policy implications.

It is this sense of subjective well-being, measured through the stories that women themselves tell, that best explains why respondents in these diverse studies answer the overarching question ‘Is an education in liberal arts worth the money?’ with such a resounding ‘Yes’. Respondents in all these studies, in different ways, and in very different contexts, express their common agreement that they feel enriched and empowered in their careers and their lives, over and above financial returns on investment. The true value of education lies not simply in career preparation for professional or high-income jobs but in enhancing people’s capabilities to shape positive choices to achieve the kinds of lives that they value.

1 Atlantic Canadian Women University Graduates

Creative Career Strategies for First Generation Women

Marilee Reimer

Introduction

This chapter¹ follows the career paths of women liberal arts university graduates. It focusses on career outcomes for first generation women students who are the first in their family to complete a university degree, hereafter referred to as first generation students. The study was conducted as an institutional ethnography as a part of a larger study on access to student support services for undergraduates who are first generation graduates in their family.

In the Canadian province of New Brunswick, 51 per cent of university graduates are the first generation to graduate in their families, representing the highest proportion provincially (MPHEC, 2009). This paper analyzes first generation and middle-class career outcomes, with a special focus on first generation women students in liberal arts majors. As an institutional ethnography, it is aimed at capturing the institutional practices and social relations that contribute to successful career outcomes. I conducted seven in-depth interviews with both first generation students and their mothers on the career process in the last year of university as well as subsequently in post-graduation—six with students in the liberal arts and one for comparison in the sciences. Three more interviews were done with middle-class mothers of at least second generation students, on their more typical career paths in the professions, including administration, accounting and one science-based career. While career outcomes are still in progress for some, these are assessed along with university choices, specialized degrees and work strategies during university and post-graduation.

I am using a restrictive definition of first generation students as high school graduates whose parents have little or no university studies and lack a university degree (Kamanzi et al., 2010). This group is well known in the literature for a range of disadvantages that are seen to affect access and retention in university programmes (Grayson, 1997; Pascarella et al., 2004; Terenzini et al., 19964; Turcotte, 2011; Tym et al., 2004). This applies to their access to university, family support, number of hours worked, parents’ income and education, and general rates of success.

First generation students are more likely to have taken time off between finishing high school and starting university; they are more likely to drop out of university before completing all requirements for a degree, and once they graduate, they are significantly less likely to continue studies into postgraduate degrees. The possibility of professional success is very small for first generation students, according to National Educational Longitudinal Study of 2000, which found that ten years out, only 0.3 per cent of the aspirants for professional or doctorate degrees and 2.6 per cent of those for master’s degrees had succeeded (McCarron & Inkeles, 2006). Yet for Canada, Kamanzi et al. (2010) found in the Youth in Transition Survey for 2005 that enrolment in graduate studies after graduation included 17 per cent of first generation students and 24 per cent of non-first generation students.

Canada has one of the highest levels of schooling in the advanced industrial world (MPHEC, 2009). However, the high proportion of first generation university graduates in New Brunswick, 51 per cent, reflects its character as an economically somewhat marginalized rural province, heavily dependent on resource extraction industries built around forestry, fishing, potato farming and ancillary support services. A decades-long decline in resource industries is pushing young people to consider other options for earning a living, including being the first in their families to consider attending university.

Furthermore, in English Canada more generally, the ability to translate schooling into a career path is unevenly distributed—by gender, social class, ethnicity, aboriginal status, etc. This research addresses the public and academic discourses on careers through an exploration of students’ lived experiences at university. It explores the factors that determine their student success, or lack thereof, in achieving career goals in relation to an unfolding public discourse on access to university and the worth of university degrees.

Much of the sociological and economic literature points to the importance of parental education to labour market outcomes (Finnie et al., 2010). Our research makes a contribution by demonstrating the importance of university career supports in helping highly talented first generation graduates to achieve their career goals. The high proportion of graduates from this student population illustrates why career-related programming is necessary to launch a career. We move the focus away from ‘parental education’ as the major explanation of labour market discourse on career outcomes; alternatively we investigate how a first generation group forges unique career paths more conditioned by their employment and education histories.

Public Discourse

Ontario provincial Premier Mike Harris (elected in 1995) was known for criticizing liberal arts as having nothing to offer on the job market. Globe and Mail journalist Margaret Wente commonly writes about liberal arts graduates with such catchy headlines as ‘Do You Want Fries with that Job?’ (Wente, 2013). In this article, she cites extensively from a book that used US data to draw conclusions about the likelihood of liberal arts graduates landing a training relevant job or one that pays better than the fast-food chain McDonalds. Bill O’Reilly, formerly on the O’Reilly Factor, jeered at a liberal arts degree as not even qualifying as an investment in your future (The O’Reilly-Lehrer Hour, 2013).

Contradictory evidence that Canadian university graduates generally are doing better than their American counterparts tends not to get the same media attention. One report calculates that about 80 per cent of Canadian graduates land training relevant jobs, compared with 39 per cent of American graduates, and argues that this may help to explain why Canadian universities have been attracting increasing numbers of American students in recent years (Karambelas, 2013). In this argument, the author does not separate out the programmes of study that students select. The Canadian data do, however, support a more positive, although still instrumental, view of the value of university education in general. This view, which we will call the working-class view, is that university education is a good option because university graduates generally earn more than high school graduates. Hence, it might be worth doing if the jobs available after high school seem dead end or to be going nowhere in a region facing economic decline.

It is the students with higher amounts of student debt upon graduation that are likely to take media messages to heart. The statistics show that they are much less likely to complete the career process and opt for immediate jobs to address indebtedness (MPHEC, 2007). If we consider the entire career process and its invisibility to many without higher education in their families, the many steps students take in the career process come to mind: we would have to raise the issue of knowing the competitive character of achieving admission into graduate and professional programmes and one’s dependence on faculty for references or on special programmes like honours degrees and upgrading, to qualify for scholarships.

The University Career Process

Three second generation, middle-class students (in the comparison group) share background assumptions and career processes most familiar to the families of professionals. Middle class parents were involved, as you would expect of a group of six parents with an average of 1.5 degrees each, including one Master’s of Engineering and Education, two Bachelor’s of Education, a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing and two Bachelor’s of Business. These parents worked in various professions as, respectively, engineers, a psychiatric nurse, an officer of a professional association, an employee of a commercial enterprise and a housewife. They assumed that all of their children would and should attend university. This was a given in family discussions well before the children finished high school and formulated some intentions of future career aspirations and courses of study before starting university. They went to university straight from high school, with their eyes on the prize of getting a professional degree as fast as possible. They were confident in the knowledge that their parents could afford to support them financially, whether or not they supplemented their studies with part-time jobs and student loans. This pattern was markedly different from the lived experiences of the first generation students that are the main focus of this research.

First Generation Students: For...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Social and Policy Directions and Women’s Careers
• Part 1 Transnational Studies of Careers, Programmes and Policies: Introduction to Part 1
• Part 2 Equity in Education and Government: Making the change in work-life equity—does it really happen? An Introduction to Part 2
• Conclusion
• Index