Speakers: Professors Kate Purcell and Peter Elias, CBE, Gaby Atfield and Dr Erika Kispeter

Date and time: 1.00 pm - 3.30 pm, Thursday, 10 March, 2022. Lunch will be provided for those attending in person, with the online event starting at 1.30 pm

Venue: Wolfson Research Exchange, Warwick University Library/Zoom

Please register on Eventbrite: face-to-face event or online event.

Researchers at the IER have been tracking a large sample of graduates from their application for a place in Higher Education in 2005/6, through to graduation in 2009/10 and into their subsequent careers. Most recently they were contacted in 2020-21 as they were experiencing the impact of Covid-19.

This event will focus on:

• What do the accounts of their experiences reveal about the effect of higher education on their capacity to survive the social and economic impacts of the pandemic? What might this tell us about the future of work for highly qualified workers?
• We will cover differences in graduate career progress and the impact of Covid-19 according to degree subject studied, occupation and sector of employment. The experiences of this sample, as in the workforce more widely, reveals a persistent and increasing gender pay gap, despite equal opportunities legislation and organisational policies – and the wide range of their earnings gives some indication of where and why this gap is most persistent.
• Working from home was empowering for some, and highly stressful for others. What are the changed patterns of working that developed because of Covid restrictions, how likely are these to persist and who will benefit?
• Finally, we will look at the cumulative impact of social, cultural and educational advantage and disadvantage to consider whether the winners and losers of the Covid-19 pandemic were those we might have expected.