L-earning: rethinking young women's working lives

This study will investigate the ways that young women (aged between 14 and 29) participate in paid work alongside their studies - whether at school, college or university - and in the period after they have completed their education. It will look at how gendered inequalities emerge in young women's earliest experiences of work and how these get solidified or are remade as their working lives develop. We will look at the ways paid work fits and is reconciled within young women's wider lives and relationships, including friendships, family, connections to their community and their developing identities and sense of self. We ask how this varies by education, comparing graduates and non-graduates, but also by ethnicity, disability, geographic location and social class background.

Most young people do paid work before they finish school or college. For those who continue their studies at university, paid work is increasingly common, due to rising student fees and the increasing cost of living. Female students are especially likely to undertake paid work alongside their studies. Common jobs include babysitter, retail cashier, waitress and steward. Some students are employed within family businesses. Others engage in income-generating activities involving digital platforms such as Etsy, Depop and Instagram. Previous studies have suggested that gender inequalities exist even in these early forms of work. Despite this we know little about the detail of young people's first experiences of work, nor how these may engender longer-term patterns and establish differences between men's and women's working lives that we know grow as workers get older.

Indeed, even though young women now outperform men in education, and outnumber them in higher education, by the time they hit their 30s, working women experience a growing gender pay gap. A large part of this is due to occupational segregation, and the concentration of women in more insecure and lower status jobs. Moreover, many of the gains made in women's employment have been stalled by recent economic disruption, including the COVID-19 pandemic, with government ministers, women's charities and business representatives voicing concerns that we risk rolling back previous improvements in gender equality. To address these challenges, it is timely and urgent to look more closely at young women's working lives, and provide detailed analysis of how they enter, move around or get stuck in specific types of work.

The study will involve different methods for capturing different phenomena; for example, analysis of existing national surveys for drawing out large-scale patterns, trends over time and over individual life-courses; focus groups and interviews with 180 young women to drill deeper into key issues, including views on good work, past experiences and hopes for the future; and interviews and roundtables with national stakeholder representatives to ensure the research meets a wide and diverse audience and has broad impact.

It will generate new knowledge about young people, work and employment, education and gendered outcomes. This will impact academic disciplines across the Social Sciences. It will produce benefits for policymakers, industry, education, and third sector organisations working to challenge inequalities and promote positive change in the lives of young women. The study will be steered by a young women's advisory group, ensuring they have a central role in shaping the research. A website, news articles, a project report, policy briefings, and a final event will ensure findings are disseminated widely to a range of audiences. Findings will also be communicated in a short film, foregrounding the voices of young women. The film will be screened at a dissemination event and launched online, supported by a national social media campaign to engage broad sections of the public - and young women in particular - in a wider conversation about young women's working lives.