Journal of Sociology

Much research has investigated how young women with tertiary education fare in contemporary labour markets and pointed to persistent gender inequalities. However, very little is known about how young women who leave school early fare in the present climate. In this article we shed light on the challenges facing these women in the ‘new work order’. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative methods, we investigate how young Australian women who have left school before completing upper secondary education fare, and how they make choices regarding education and work as they envision their futures. Our analyses reveal a perceived and real tension between education and ‘real’ experience in the labour market. This leaves young women without upper secondary qualifications in a difficult position when making decisions about their futures.

Uncertainty and insecurity in the labour market for young women have increased dramatically. Globally, notions of ‘precariousness’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘gig working’ have grown and the idea of secure permanent work and ‘career building’ is seen as a thing of the past. Simultaneously, and not unconnected, we have also seen the ‘massification’ of higher education where more young women than ever are entering university aiming to improve their situation in the labour market. But how, in these uncertain times, are they imagining their futures? What is influencing their planning and what are their motivations? These questions were explored with a diverse group of young women (n = 26) who were third-year students at a university in Aotearoa New Zealand. The analysis of their interviews draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and findings highlight the need to recognise the important relationships between their past, the present and their imagined futures.

The increasingly complex relationship between educational qualifications and employment is an integral, yet little-explored dimension of the labour market developments that have come to be referred to as the ‘gig economy’. This article explores the changing meaning and relevance of education through an analysis of young people’s employment outcomes in terms of employment status, having a job in their field of study and job satisfaction. It shows that while higher levels of education do provide some protection from unemployment, the relationship is murky. A relatively large proportion of highly educated young adults are experiencing underemployment and precarious work. Young women are less engaged in the labour market. Furthermore, those with secure jobs do not necessarily find them meaningful and those with meaningful jobs are not necessarily in secure employment. For many young people, using their educational qualifications to find security in work is a bit like ‘chasing rainbows’.

Temporary work is common across Europe, especially among young people. Whether temporary employment is a transitory stage on the road to standard employment, and whether this varies depending on institutional contexts, is controversial. This article investigates variability in transition rates from temporary to permanent employment across Europe, and how this is related to employment protection legislation (EPL) and the vocational specificity of education systems. We utilize harmonized panel data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, covering 18 European countries and including 34,088 temporary workers aged 18–30. The results show that stricter EPL is associated with lower rates of transitions to permanent employment, while partial deregulation, with strict EPL for permanent contracts but weaker EPL for temporary contracts, is associated with higher transition rates. Vocationally specific education systems have higher transition rates, on average. Moreover, the role of EPL is conditional on the degree of vocational specificity.

Post-Fordism describes a situation in which precarity and un/underemployment becomes normalised while the requirement for young people to seek subjectivity through work is intensified. In this context, this article draws on interviews with youth living in regions of high youth unemployment to examine how young people create identities as workers. The article shows that young people approach the cultivation of a working self in terms of how the capacity for productive labour contributes to projects of ‘self-realisation’. Classed subjectivities are formed through the different ethics through which young people approach the formation of the self as a worker. This demonstrates how the disciplinary requirements of work contribute to the contemporary experience of class among youth. The article concludes by suggesting that generational shifts in the experience of youth currently associated with employment insecurity can be usefully understood in terms of the dynamics of post-Fordist labouring subjectivities.

By taking an historical perspective, and by drawing on our own empirical work from the UK in the 1980s and more recently, we argue three main things. First, we need to understand the particular conditions of ‘the gig economy’ as a concentrated form of a more general de-standardisation of employment that has brought multiple forms of insecure work. Second, although there is clamour and excitement about ‘the gig economy’ in fact it shares strong parallels with earlier forms of insecure enterprise. Third, while not uniform nor as yet fully empirically demonstrated, young adults’ encounters with the ‘gig economy’ and other aspects of the contemporary labour market (such as the ‘low-pay, no-pay’ cycle, self-employment, ‘zero-hours contracts’) appear to be typified by a lack of choice and control, and experiences of disempowerment, low pay, degraded work conditions, alienation, anxiety and insecurity. This stands at odds with more celebratory proclamations about ‘the gig economy’.

This article explores the characteristics, experiences, and motivations of men and women who secure work through digital platforms. Drawing on quantitative survey data – the first of its kind – of Australian men (n = 251) and women (n = 253) it finds that the gig economy, much like the wider economy, is highly gender-segregated. Men dominate platforms which specialise in what might be considered traditionally male tasks like transport and women dominate platforms which specialise in more traditional female tasks like caring. The results suggest that the gig economy may be an alternative for women in the creative industries. Men and women are both drawn to the gig economy for income-related reasons, despite a significant proportion of them holding a job outside the gig economy. Flexibility was an important motivator for both genders, but women were more likely than men to report that they did gig work because it ‘fitted with their schedule’, indicating that non-work commitments such as family constrain women more than men. More men than women reported that gig work was effective in generating income.

Research considering how time is organised has shown that women tend to carry a disproportionate burden of coordinating the schedules of their households. However, little research has considered how these gendered inequalities may manifest in the context of the shift away from ‘standard’ work patterns and towards variable and non-standard hours. We address this question by using interview and digital data to consider how a selection of ‘ordinary’ Australian young adults in heterosexual partnerships manage and coordinate their time. We contend that even for middle-class young adults with relatively high employment security, increasingly complex working arrangements are shifting existing inequalities in gendered divisions of temporal labour in ways that heighten feelings of temporal insecurity. We conceptualise our findings as part of an intensification of the existing need to schedule and manage lives that is widely felt in the so-called ‘gig economy era’, even by those removed from gig work proper.

In the debates about the future of work there is a lack of analysis on how young women and men are approaching their future work and family lives. In this article we use data collected in the Australian Women’s Working Future (AWWF) Project 2017 to analyse what young workers imagine will be important to their future success in work and family. We find that formal workplace supports for care, such as paid parental leave and childcare, and workplace flexibility are identified as very important. Shared domestic labour is also desired. Parents have the strongest expectations for care policy supports. Young men without children are least likely to factor these into future work trajectories, while young women do. However, data on women’s plans for family formation, compared with men’s, suggests that difficulties accessing vital care supports pose a risk to young women’s ability to work, form families and care.