Eunice Mbugua is a PhD All But Dissertation candidate in York University’s(YU) Gender, Feminist & Women’s Studies program, and a teaching assistant in YU’s school of Gender Sexuality and Women studies.
Her dissertation research examines the experiences of professional sub-Saharan African immigrant women(PSAIW) from East Africa, living in the GTA, navigating the Canadian professional labour market. She interrogates the root causes and effects of their labour market discrimination through a social stratification, systemic inequalities, ethnicity, and racial disparities lens.
Eunice’s dissertation expands on her Master’s research paper (MRP) findings (2023), a comprehensive literature review that interrogated the historical perspectives and discourses that shape the contemporary experiences of professional sub-Saharan African immigrant women navigating the Canadian professional labour market. Her MRP found that despite the Canadian Employment Equity Act’s (1986) commitment to ensure workplace equality and correct discrimination experienced by women, visible minorities, Aboriginals, and persons with disabilities, professional sub-Saharan African immigrant women are discriminated due to gendered historical anti-Black and anti-African racism. These specific gaps are gravely understudied, and inhibits access to settlement resources, professional development, and upward mobility, causing disproportionate unemployment, underemployment, and over-representation in precarious jobs, while masking the socially constructed barriers to professional labour market integration and participation.
Using an intersectional, critical race, and feminist anti racist framework, her study analyzes how societal structures anchor anti African labour market discrimination that produces unequal resource distribution, lack of economic opportunities, and perpetuates generational poverty, at the intersection of race, gender, class, and place of origin.