Equally bad, unevenly distributed: gender and the ‘black box’ of student employment

Students comprise approximately four per cent of the UK labour force and as much as 20% in some occupations and jobs. Yet students' work is typically seen as marginal, secondary both to their current learning and future working biographies. Public and media attention on ‘earning while learning’ (EwL) tends to focus on the negative impacts of paid work on education. Meanwhile students' actual working conditions, occupations and employment experiences have received limited attention and constitute something of a ‘black box’. We open that box by examining the paid work undertaken by full-time students. Through analysis of a national data set, we examine patterns with respect to employment rates, pay, hours, and occupations, as well as how these are gendered. We find a small ‘studentness’ penalty—lower pay for students than non-student workers of the same age. We also find small increases in the proportion currently engaged in paid work. Gender is identified as a key variable in shaping student employment rates, with women considerably more likely than men to work while studying. We find no evidence of a gender pay gap in EwL, but this is largely because most student workers are concentrated in two ‘integrated’ occupations, which we designate as ‘equally bad’ - poorly paid but gender equitable. Older students are more likely to work in gender-segregated occupations, with some indications of male and female gender pay advantages for gender-dominant employment, suggesting a possible early incentive for occupational gender segregation. Given the gender disparity in student work, a core finding is that women disproportionately undertake this poor-quality work. We argue that to address the under-theorisation of EwL, student employment—including its gendering—requires greater attention and should be integrated into conceptualisations of a ‘working-life-course’.