The Leaky Pipeline Revisited : Using Sociocultural Fit and Intersectionality to Analytically and Empirically Tackle Unequal Educational Transitions on the Example of Gender and the Subject Selection of French

Abstract

The leaky pipeline metaphor is used to describe the dropout rate of certain populations from certain careers like women from academia or people of color from teaching jobs. While the phenomena are acknowledged, the term leaky pipeline has been criticized for lacking systematicity in describing social inequalities and for its inherent functionalism. Based on this criticism, this paper discusses ways to systematically account for a) the social context, via sociocultural fit; b) the leaking populations and their interwoven social belongings, via intersectionality; and c) the theoretical integration and empirical application of these concepts, via a sociology of knowledge approach. I demonstrate these procedures on an example from the field of institutional language learning, the de/selection decision concerning French, to be made at the transition to high school.