Concrete Ceilings: African Canadian Women and the Pursuit of Leadership in the Public Sector
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research consisted of qualitative interviews with 21 Black women who currently held, had held, or were qualified for managerial-level positions in the public service sector. The research questions were as follows: (1) What internal and external supports contribute to Black women obtaining leadership positions in the public sector in Canada? (2) What internal and external barriers have Black women faced in obtaining leadership positions in the Canadian public sector? The researchers conclude that Black women experience various forms of discrimination, racism, oppression and typecasting, which have been prevalent in their journeys through public sector employment. Participants identified many barriers to being successful in the workplace, most of which can be attributed to racism. In spite of these barriers, a number of Black women identified internal and external supports and strengths that had enabled them to obtain these positions. The most prevalent supports found in this study include self-determination, faith, colleagues and mentors, community supports, friends and family. Many participants identified these supports as helping them to be successful in the public sector, in spite of the systematic racism that exists. By participating in this study, Black women reported feeling heard and validated. Three recommendations arose: the establishment of a formal support system for Black women interested in public-sector employment; commitment from public-sector leaders to assist in system-wide changes; and a call to action for African Canadian women to engage in activities that promote ongoing self-advocacy and self-empowerment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".