Title:
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Mature female graduates : moving on?.
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As the higher education system expanded during the 1980s
and early 1990s increasing numbers of mature women
undertook the transition to graduate life. Such women
also have a potentially prominent role as employees in
the labour market of the mid-1990s in which the workforce
is described as both feminised and "greying". Yet the
dominant framework of research on the transition of
graduates to the labour market, despite its recognition
of the influence of structural factors of difference
among graduates, has paid scant attention to the
experiences of mature female graduates. This study begins
the process of redressing that situation by adding both
quantitative and qualitative data on the labour market
outcomes of becoming a mature female graduate.
The study's methodology is informed by feminist critiques
of mainstream social research, and a central concern is
to prioritise the perspectives of participants. The 137
women whose voices are represented in this dissertation
entered first degree study on non-vocational courses,
full or part-time, at or above the age of 21. They
graduated from the University of Wolverhampton in 1994
and 1995. From their perspectives the transition entails
considerably wider questions than those posed directly in
relation to employment. Rather, the issues involve a
complex interrelationship between structural and
situational factors and the graduates' responses to
these. Therefore the scope of the study incorporates
questions of agency, understood as an aspect of identity.
Escape, resilience, adaptation and marginality are core
features of the findings connecting the three alternative
forms of analysis presented. In these the graduates are
first viewed collectively, then re-grouped in accordance
with issues of age, gender, social class and ethnicity,
and, finally, removed from categories in order to explore
issues of identity and diversity. These analyses are then
argued to be complementary perspectives that illustrate a
possibility of moving beyond dichotomous approaches to
understanding women's lives. The study concludes that the
composite mature female graduate, Educated Rita, may be
located and identified by addressing questions of
structure and agency, similarity and difference, and that
she considers the transition to be one in which she moves on
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