Calling it like they see it? Young adults’ discourses of employment and labour market inequalities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Work experiences in the early career phase can have a lasting impact on employment engagement and quality of life. Not all young adults have access to resources that support labour market success. Some may contend with barriers to employment connected to their social identities and circumstances which perpetuate disadvantage. This paper examines how young adults frame their early work experiences and the advantage or disadvantage they may face in the labour market. Design/methodology/approach We conducted qualitative interviews with 47 young adults (ages 18–35 years) from Ontario, Canada representing diverse and intersecting identities of race, gender, sexuality, disability, education, socioeconomic level and immigration status. The data were interpreted using discourse analysis and through an intersectional lens. Findings Participants framed their early work experiences according to discourses of privilege, need and luck. Discursive constructions revealed or obscured advantage or disadvantage within early work experiences and highlighted how young adults with various intersecting identities understood their employment possibilities and choices. Originality/value By focusing on discourses of early work experiences, we illustrate how young adults make sense of their trajectories exploring understandings of privilege along with oppression in uneven power relations and social structures. Adopting an intersectional approach, we offer a complex depiction regarding young adults’ understandings of privilege, disadvantage and the role of luck, and challenge ideological notions of merit, choice and agency navigating contemporary labour markets.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".