Intersecting the Academic Gender Gap: The Education of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual America

Although gender is central to contemporary accounts of educational stratification, sexuality has been largely invisible as a population-level axis of academic inequality. Taking advantage of major recent data expansions, the current study establishes sexuality as a core dimension of educational stratification in America. First, I analyze lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) adults’ college completion rates: overall, by race/ethnicity and by birth cohort. Then, using new data from the High School Longitudinal Survey of 2009, I analyze LGB students’ performance on a full range of achievement and attainment measures. Across analyses, I reveal two demographic facts. First, women’s rising academic advantages are largely confined to straight women: although lesbian women historically outpaced straight women, in contemporary cohorts, lesbian and bisexual women face significant academic disadvantages. Second, boys’ well-documented underperformance obscures one group with remarkably high levels of school success: gay boys. Given these facts, I propose that marginalization from hegemonic gender norms has important—but asymmetric—impacts on men and women’s academic success. To illustrate this point, I apply what I call a “gender predictive” approach, using supervised machine learning methods to uncover patterns of inequality otherwise obscured by the binary sex/gender measures typically available in population research.

Educational Transitions and Educational Inequality: A Multiple Pathways Sequential Logit Model Analysis of Finnish Birth Cohorts 1960–1985

We developed a multiple pathways sequential logit model for analysing social background inequality in completed education and applied it to analyse educational inequality in Finland (birth cohorts 1960–1985). Our model builds on the sequential logit model for educational transitions, originally presented by Robert D. Mare and later extended by Maarten Buis, which disaggregates inequality in completed education into the weighted sum of inequalities in the transitions leading to it. Although the educational transitions framework is popular among educational stratification researchers, its applications have almost exclusively focused on analysing inequalities in separate educational transitions. Buis presented a unifying model of inequalities in educational transitions and completed education, which gives a substantive interpretation to the weights that link them. We applied this to an educational system in which the same educational outcomes can be reached through multiple pathways. Our analysis of Finnish register data shows that intergenerational educational persistence increased, particularly among women. The main reasons are increased inequality in academic upper-secondary (gymnasium) completion and gymnasium expansion that increased the weight of this transition as well as of the transition to university. We discuss the integration of structural and allocative mechanisms in educational stratification research.

2019 Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture Education Research and the Disruption of Racialized Distortions: Establishing a Wide Angle View

Given contemporary recognition of how racialized micro-interactions and the embedded distortions of marginalized and minoritized folk compound over time to produce and reify educational stratification and inequality, this article is an opportunity to think more deliberately about how education researchers can better delineate empirically and conceptually the complexity and temporal spread of these micro-moments, their reproductive momentum, and the prospects for disruption. In capturing these more complex dynamics, scholars are better positioned to generate more nuanced and precise representations of racially minoritized folk and, by implication, White folk. These research commitments require the utilization of the analytical stance I refer to as the wide angle view. This article outlines the parameters and affordances of this view and the interpretive and methodological practices that follow.