Cohort: ESOL 38°
Topic of the thesis: The interaction between gender and ethnic origin over educational attainment in europe: impact, cross-national variations, and trends over time.
Abstract: Education is a key variable in the analysis of social-inequalities. My research project will focus on the interaction between gender and ethnic origin on educational attainment. In the interpretation of educational inequalities, we must start from Boudon's distinction of primary and secondary effects (1974). Primary effects are the result of socialization and genetic predisposition which produces social-origin effects on students' performance (grades / marks) while secondary effects stem from rational evaluations of costs, benefits, and probability of success. Secondary effects analyse why different social groups tend to take different educational choices based on these evaluations, once academic performance is accounted for (Erikson and Jonsson, 1996; Breen and Goldthorpe, 1997). It follows that the different distribution of social, cultural, and economic capital produces important implication on educational opportunities. Almost everywhere in Europe, European and Asian minorities tend to outperform natives, while South American, Turkish, and northern African tend to do worst (Xie, Fang and Shauman, 2015; Drouhot and Nee, 2019). As explained by Kao and Thompson (2003) just half of the variation analyzed between natives and ethnic minorities is due to class differentials, hence minorities' social context -not strictly due socioeconomical constraints- determines an effect also on their offspring's educational opportunities. Kao and Thompson explain that this may be due to language difficulties, differences in social aspiration, lack of cultural capital and presence of prejudice and discrimination. It has been demonstrated that ethnic minorities display differences in terms of social aspiration, cultural capital perception over educational benefits. Hence, each ethnic group tends to differ in how they perceive educational benefits, costs, and the academic abilities of their children. In other words, those differences can be explained both in terms of cultural specificities and the level of social integration of that social group in the hosting community. One of the aims of my work will be to understand if the gender and ethnic effects are merely additive or if there is a multiplicative effect. In other words, do these sub-categories experience an additional discriminatory effect which has not been fully analysed, or can they be described by traditional models? The research I am proposing, by answering these and other questions, is focused on the analysis of the interaction between ethnic origin and gender in terms of educational attainment which will be measured in terms of highest educational title achieved (Ballarino and Bernardi, 2014). The project is structured into three articles that will analyse the interaction between gender and ethnic origin on the access to higher education among different countries and over time.
Research interests: Economic sociology; Educational inequalities; Gender Stratification; Ethnic origin stratification.
Graduated from: University of Milan - B.A. & M.A.
Degrees obtained: B.A. in Political Science ; M.A. in Global Politics and Society
E-mail address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
