Caroline Berggren

Broadening recruitment to higher education through the admission system: gender and class perspectives

Alternative entrance routes into higher education have been established in Sweden in order to facilitate the entrance of under‐represented groups of students. The question is whether or not the additional entrance possibilities have served their purpose and, if so, to what extent. This is a longitudinal study using register data on one whole cohort, with the aim to follow these individuals’ educational careers up to university matriculation. The analyses simultaneously consider effects of gender and class. Results show that upper middle‐class men are most successful in utilising every one of the additional entrance possibilities. The additional entrance possibilities have increased class bias in higher education even more, and the Swedish Scholastic Assessment Test, in particular, is an important contributor to this bias.

Gender equality policies and higher education careers

Gender equality policies regulate the Swedish labour market, including higher education. This study analyses and discusses the career development of postgraduate students in the light of labour market influences. The principle of gender separation is used to understand these effects. Swedish register data encompassing information on 585 postgraduate students born in 1948, 1953 and 1967 were analysed. Since higher education and the labour market are horizontally gender‐divided, career options are different for men and women. Men, both those who did and did not obtain a postgraduate degree, were more likely to work within the private sector, compared to women who were more likely to complete their degrees and more likely to work within the public sector. In other words, whilst women more often remain within higher education, men, probably due to their academic specialisation, are in greater demand on the regular labour market, meaning that studies, to a greater extent, can remain incomplete. Until the 1960s higher education was very selective, where participation by women and individuals with less well‐educated family backgrounds was rare. After the expansion of higher education, both the student and faculty bodies have become increasingly diversified. However, new demarcations have emerged; between those who receive research funding and those who do not, and between those who work within higher education and those who leave for other, competing options outside.

The Influence of Higher Education Institutions on Labor Market Outcomes

In this study, different institutions of higher education and their effects on employment opportunities for professionals in Sweden are compared and analyzed. The availability of extensive, longitudinal register data made it possible to determine a match between degree and occupation for higher education graduates aged twenty-six to twenty-eight years (N = 8,675). Multiple multinomial regression analysis was used. In line with previous research, a degree from an old and well-established university was most likely to lead to a matching occupation. The results were significant also after having controlled for type of degree, family background, and educational achievement, among other factors.

The Education–Occupation Match, Seen From an Educational Perspective

This is a Swedish study about the correspondence between higher education studies and the obtained profession considering both skill level and specialisation. The labour market position in 2002, for a student population, aged 26–28 years, was analyzed. Also those students who had not obtained a degree, but who had studied at least two years were included. Income was not considered when a match was determined. Social class background did not have any effect on matching when types of higher education studies were the same. It was more likely that a woman would find a matching employment than a man. Having a degree improved the chances of obtaining a matching profession by three times.

The motherhood penalty and the professional credential: inequality in career development for those with professional degrees

Transitions from education to work constitute a distinct set of situations where discrimination is likely to occur. Gender beliefs generally disadvantage women, and when coupled with beliefs regarding parental responsibility, tend to heavily disadvantage mothers. Yet we suggest that professional credentials create a divided labour market, with ameliorative effects. Credentials tend to match specifically to jobs and replace other means of determining the performance expectations of various job candidates. This should be especially true in the public sector, where hiring procedures are more transparent. As a result, we hypothesise that mothers with professional credentials will be less disadvantaged within the occupational market matched to their credentials, especially in the public sector. Data from Sweden, following 43,646 graduates with professional degrees into the labour market, generally support this interpretation, though substantial motherhood penalties remain in many professions. We briefly discuss the implications of these findings.

Re-purposing fika: rest, recreation or regulation in the neoliberalized swedish university?

ABSTRACT Fika is the Swedish practice of assembling for a coffee break at work or home. This paper investigates the material, social and temporal investments in fika in accelerated and accountable organizational cultures, and asks what purpose it serves in neoliberalised academic employment regimes today. Analysis of our thirteen interviews with administrators and academics in a Faculty of Education in a large research-intensive Swedish university suggests that there are multiple interpretations of fika. Traditionally, fika has been used as a site for team-building, democratization, and well-being at work, but might have been re-purposed and incorporated in neoliberal surveillance and normalization technologies in which ones corporate loyalty and interpersonal skills are made visible for assessment. We noted an affective and gendered economy with fika eliciting feelings of pleasure in the social and recreational aspects, but shame and anger at what was perceived as coercion to perform a particular type of sociable subjectivity.

Self-employment and field of education understood from current entrepreneurship research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look at how results from a large-scale study can be understood in the context of contemporary gender and entrepreneurship research. Design/methodology/approach – This study is inspired by a mixed methods methodology. To gain a qualitative understanding of the general patterns in a large-scale study, research results in articles from the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship (IJGE) were used. To make such a heterogeneous research field as appears in IJGE comparable, a model was created that helped us to focus our attention when reading the articles. The core of each article was identified. Findings – The categorisation of the articles in IJGE resulted in three perspectives: liberal, functional and structural. The liberal and functional perspectives improved our understanding only partially because these perspectives usually focused on a certain aspect in the society. The structural perspective more readily lent itself for interpretation of our large-...