"It wasn't the end that I was so much interested in, it was the journey": Stories of women who pursued a PhD later in life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study provides an exploratory analysis of the experiences of seven women over 50 years of age who returned to an Ontario university to pursue a PhD in early to mid-2000 and who graduated between 2010 and 2018. Using a life course perspective framed within a feminist theory and research, political economy standpoint, I examined the socio-cultural, economic and ageing factors that pulled these women back into university. I looked at how their pursuit of a PhD shaped their sense of self, their personal identities, their life goals; the factors which impeded and facilitated their progress through their doctoral program; and how they used their individual and collective agency to grapple with structural barriers. In-depth interviews were conducted to gather the womens stories. The findings showed that while all the women came from modest beginnings at a time when opportunities for girls were limited they held fast to their dream of a PhD. When time and material means made a return to university possible they returned. Through resistance and persistence, and with the transferable personal and career skills and knowledge they brought to their studies, they realized their dream. The findings also showed that age is not necessarily a barrier to pursuing a rigorous academic degree; age was in fact the catalyst that pulled the women back to university and the facilitator of their success. And the findings revealed the importance to the women of contributing their accumulated knowledge and their new knowledge to the university and society at large.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".