L-earning: rethinking young women's working lives

这项研究将调查年轻女性(年龄在14岁至29岁之间)在学业之余参与有偿工作的方式--无论是在学校、学院还是大学--以及在她们完成学业后的一段时间内。它将着眼于年轻女性最初的工作经历中如何出现性别不平等，以及随着她们工作生活的发展，这些不平等如何得到巩固或重塑。我们将研究有偿工作在年轻女性更广泛的生活和关系中的适应和协调方式，包括友谊、家庭、与社区的联系以及她们不断发展的身份和自我意识。我们询问受教育程度如何变化，比较毕业生和非毕业生，以及种族、残疾、地理位置和社会阶层背景。大多数年轻人在完成学业或大学学业之前就做起了带薪工作。对于那些继续在大学学习的人来说，由于不断上涨的学费和不断上涨的生活成本，有偿工作越来越普遍。女学生尤其有可能在学习的同时从事有偿工作。常见的工作包括保姆、零售收银员、服务员和乘务员。一些学生受雇于家族企业。其他人则从事创收活动，涉及Etsy、Deop和Instagram等数字平台。以前的研究表明，即使在这些早期的工作形式中，也存在性别不平等。尽管如此，我们对年轻人第一次工作经历的细节知之甚少，也不知道这些经验如何产生更长期的模式，并在男性和女性的工作生活之间建立差异，我们知道这种差异随着工人年龄的增长而增长。事实上，尽管年轻女性现在在教育方面的表现优于男性，在高等教育方面的人数也超过了男性，但到了30多岁时，职业女性面临着越来越大的性别薪酬差距。这在很大程度上是由于职业隔离，以及妇女集中在更没有安全感和地位更低的工作中。此外，由于最近的经济动荡，包括新冠肺炎疫情，女性就业方面取得的许多进展已经停滞不前，政府部长、妇女慈善机构和商界代表表达了担忧，担心我们可能会倒退之前在性别平等方面取得的进展。为了应对这些挑战，及时而紧迫的是更密切地关注年轻女性的职业生活，并详细分析她们是如何进入、流动或陷入特定类型的工作中的。这项研究将涉及捕捉不同现象的不同方法；例如，分析现有的国家调查，以得出一段时间和个人生活过程中的大规模模式和趋势；重点小组和对180名年轻妇女的访谈，以更深入地挖掘关键问题，包括对良好工作、过去的经验和对未来的希望的看法；与国家利益攸关方代表的访谈和圆桌会议，以确保研究接触到广泛和不同的受众，并产生广泛的影响。它将产生关于年轻人、工作和就业、教育和性别成果的新知识。这将影响整个社会科学的学术学科。它将为致力于挑战不平等并促进年轻女性生活积极变化的政策制定者、工业、教育和第三部门组织带来好处。这项研究将由一个年轻女性顾问小组指导，确保她们在制定研究过程中发挥核心作用。网站、新闻文章、项目报告、政策简报和最终活动将确保将调查结果广泛传播给各种受众。调查结果还将通过短片传达，突出年轻女性的声音。这部电影将在一个传播活动上放映，并在全国社交媒体活动的支持下在网上推出，该活动旨在让广大公众--尤其是年轻女性--参与到关于年轻女性职业生活的更广泛的讨论中。

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.