Conference Program

In the UK, universities are seen as a key driver of social mobility (Brooks et al. 2025; Reay 2021) with meritocratic discourses around aspiration and hard work underpinning decades of widening access and participation initiatives across successive governments (Harrison and Waller 2018). Celebratory narratives point to the increasing percentage of young people from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds attending university each year, and the position of young women – who outnumber their male counterparts by 52% to 40% (Bolton and Lewis 2025) –as meritocracy’s winners; hard working, savvy and entrepreneurial (Allen and Finn 2024). Notwithstanding data on women’s participation, and the vocal concerns about young men ‘missing out’ on the promises of meritocracy via university (Hilman 2025), recently there has been significant and growing attention on inequalities within the university experience relating to an increasing number of students taking on paid employment during study (Neves et al. 2025; Adams 2024). In both wider policy discourse and academic literature, ‘earning while learning’ (hereafter, EwL) is typically presented in binary terms; as positive for developing young people’s labour market experience and ‘employability’, or as hindering students’ ability to fully engage in their academic studies and risking their degree outcomes and future prospects. Given that women graduates are already likely to earn 6% lower than male graduates one year after study (Bolton and Lewis 2025), the impact of EwL on the apparent winners of meritocracy needs further interrogation.

To do this, this paper draws on data from a three-year, ESRC-funded, mixed-methods study (2022-2026) that examines patterns of EwL in England longitudinally, and through young women’s own narratives of working during full-time education and their earliest post-study labour market experiences. We present our data to show that women students are 50% more likely than men to undertake EwL and whilst there is very little difference in pay for men and women, this is because student pay is generally low for all (Zhong et al 2025). Whilst our quantitative findings highlight classed, raced and gendered inequalities in engagement in EwL, they show that working while in university does not impact the quality of degree outcomes nor occupation. However, for young women, working long-hours during university lowers the likelihood of progression into senior roles. The paper moves from these headlines into a deeper interrogation of young women’s everyday experiences of EwL through analysis of 16 focus groups that reveals the struggles of women students’ early exposure to poor pay, abuse and burnout (Hardy et al. 2026) but also how these sit in tension with the ways EwL brings opportunities for agency and social connection and independence. The paper illuminates how the diverse experiences and structuring of EwL in England shapes women’s negotiations of, and cruel attachments to (Berlant 2011), meritocratic discourses of success both in the present and the future.