Consistent with earlier surveys of the literature, I conclude that the average (or average marginal) return to education is not much below the estimate that emerges from a standard human capital earnings function fit by OLS. I focus on four areas of work: theoretical and econometric advances in modelling the causal effect of education in the presence of heterogeneous returns to schooling recent studies that use institutional aspects of the education system to form instrumental variables estimates of the return to schooling recent studies of the earnings and schooling of twins and recent attempts to explicitly model sources of heterogeneity in the returns to education. This paper surveys the recent literature on the causal relationship between education and earnings. Differences relative to full-time vocational education appear to be country-specific and generally only secondary in magnitude. The value of apprenticeship for females is low in some countries. The evidence suggests that in contemporary advanced economies apprenticeship is associated unevenly with economic advantages, primarily as a source of more stable employment for young male adults, and more in relation to regular youth employment and training than to vocational education. International comparisons and studies of aggregate productivity are then considered as additional sources of information. The statistical and economic obstacles to reaching conclusions based upon such evidence are discussed. Economic evidence on both comparisons is reviewed, based primarily upon subsequent labour market outcomes for participants along the two routes. In the first case, the relevant comparison is to full-time vocational schooling in the second, to the youth labour market, including employment, unemployment and labour market programmes. The merits of apprenticeship can be considered from two standpoints, according to whether it is viewed as vocational education or job training. Ultimately, the public policy decisions that make up the apprenticeship training and certification system in Canada reproduce gender inequality. The article argues that apprenticeship training and certification is constructed to respond to the needs of male-dominated trades, but not the needs of female-dominated trades. Thus women remain segregated in low-paying trades and receive fewer public supports when pursuing training in these segregated trades. While efforts have targeted women to facilitate entry into non-traditional occupations such as electricians and plumbers, female-dominated trades such as hairstylists remain untouched, thereby sustaining the gendered wage structure of the economy. In particular, using a case study, we illustrate that the gendered structure of the labour market is preserved and reproduced. In this article, we explore the gendered dimensions of apprenticeship programmes in Canada, demonstrating the ways in which gender inequality is reproduced by programmes that situate employers and women as responsible for change. As part of these efforts, increasing attention is focusing on programmes to encourage women to enter skilled trades, while paying little attention to those trades traditionally dominated by females. In the past decade, Canadian federal and provincial governments have designed programmes to facilitate entry into trades in an attempt to stimulate economic growth. We conclude that the third model offers a conceptualization of intersectionality that is the most consistent with the feminist literature. We demonstrate with research illustrations that the models do a progressively better job at satisfying the criteria. Using these criteria, we evaluate: (1) multiple regression including context as a higher-order interaction (2) multiple regressions run within different contexts and compared and (3) multilevel regression including context as a higher-order level of analysis.

We identify three features of intersectional analysis highlighted in the feminist literature: (1) attention to context (2) a heuristic approach to identifying relevant dimensions of inequality (3) and addressing the complex, multidimensional structuring of inequality. To contribute to this debate, we assess the conceptualizations of intersectionality embedded in the most common approach to quantitative analysis, multiple regression. We acknowledge a range of conflicting opinions about the suitability of current quantitative techniques. This article examines the use of quantitative methods to advance feminist-inspired understandings of intersectionality.

Emmanuelle quiri