Major report finds young women's earliest experiences of work impacts their long-term careers
A major report has been launched today by the ‘L-earning: rethinking young women’s working lives’ project, which presents new insights into the working lives of young women (age 14 to 29).
Interviews with 150 young women without children and 3 large national datasets shows the lasting impact that the earliest experiences of work have on women’s long-term careers. The aim was to address the question of why workplace inequalities emerge and embed even before the ‘motherhood penalty’, which is usually pointed to as a key source of women’s inequality at work.
In the face of a whole range of issues, women try and address them but are rarely listened to.
Report headlines
- Young women are 50% more likely than men to participate in paid work during their studies, with a range of implications for women’s academic engagement and wellbeing.
- Sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination are central to young women’s experiences, even the youngest women workers who are still in school.
- Students are an underrepresented, but highly exploited segment of the workforce and there is a need to recognise student work as real work.
- Despite high ambitions, young women’s work trajectories are easily derailed by life circumstances, workplace problems, and lack of progression opportunities, meaning young women quickly reduce their ambitiousness in the workplace.
- Women’s attempts to remedy problems at work are usually unsuccessful, leading them to fall back on highly feminised sectors, which are marked by lower pay and progression and this is a key way in which inequalities between men and women are creating before the motherhood penalty sets in.
- Low pay means that some women find work ‘unaffordable’ and they are unable to achieve expected life cycle milestones, such as buying a house or financial independence from parents or partners.
The study’s principal investigator, Professor Kim Allen, said:
“Student work is not new, but young people are increasingly having to support themselves – and often times their family – through part-time jobs. These jobs offer a range of benefits, but they also present challenges.
Students are not only poorly paid, but often feel unsafe and powerless in the workplace. Young women are 50% more likely than their male peers to engage in paid work while studying, and therefore bear a greater burden.
These issues don’t end when young women leave education but persist across their working lives. In the face of a whole range of issues, women try and address them but are rarely listened to. So they fall back on sectors dominated by women, which have worse pay and conditions.
Rather than ban students from working, educational institutions, employers and unions must work together to improve the conditions of student work and support young people to engage in meaningful, decent and fair work.
Given the longer-term impact of these experiences, it is also vital that young people are engaged in Employment Rights Literacy at the earliest age, and provided with the knowledge and tools to contest workplace problems. But, the solution can’t end with young people. Government, employers and trade unions must work together to protect the employment rights of young workers – including students. The government’s Employment Rights Bill is a positive step in the right direction and must be utilised to ensure that women no longer face inequality in the workplace.”
Participants said:
“I’d say the main issue is harassment… I’ve worked in a lot of bars and clubs and I find that the harassment is really, really, bad, like people will touch you… They’re very persistent” – Marina, 20, higher education student
“I was the only person of colour in that team. I was subject of harassment, bullying... I was off sick for 6 months because it was just awful... I took it all to HR and they’d filed an investigation... I didn’t really receive an outcome... I’ve never experienced anything like that. [It] absolutely floored me. It’s taken me a long time to get my confidence back up again after that.” – Faiza, 27, youth worker
“The fear is that they’re going to take your money because they’re going to take your hours... We just are too scared to say anything on zero hours’ contracts. (…) Honestly, my approach is to just keep things sweet... That’s where you end up feeling powerless, because you want to protect your own income and therefore you put up with shit.” – Sarah, 29, home care worker
Information about the project and research team
‘L-earning: rethinking young women’s working lives’ is a 3-year national study of young women’s earliest experiences of work and how these experiences may contribute to gendered inequalities in later life. The study is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of the ‘Transforming Working Lives’ initiative.
The report is authored by Kim Allen (University of Leeds), Rachel Cohen (City St George’s, University of London), Kirsty Finn (University of Manchester), Kate Hardy (University of Leeds), Lilith Brouwers (University of Leeds), Cassie Kill (University of Sheffield), and Mia Zhong (University of Leeds).
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