Young Women’s Trust aims to give young women a platform to raise their voices and build their power. By doing so, we will ensure widespread visibility of the financial penalty that young women face.
We’ll do this by:
- Publishing an evidence base about the challenges young women face and the solutions, including through our annual survey and conducting peer research to understand young women’s experiences
- Bringing young women together with politicians and employers
- Growing our network of young women who challenge inequality and working with them to run campaigns.
Growing the evidence
Young women’s unique experiences are often missing from official statistics. We have set up an effective Research Centre to build the evidence base on young women’s lives and identify changes that young women need to raise their incomes and achieve an equal world of work.
Building on its success, we will:
- Develop and promote an evidence base on the income gap between young women and young men, its causes, solutions, and
how it changes over time. - Carry out and publish research on the discrimination young women experience in the workplace, and use this to campaign
for changes to policy, practice, attitudes and behaviour. - Continue to run our annual ‘state of the nation’ survey into young women’s working and financial lives.
- Develop research partnerships with think tanks, research institutes and others who can contribute to and benefit from the evidence base on young women’s experiences in the labour market.
- Continue to train young women as peer researchers who shape and conduct research with other young women to understand their experiences and the challenges they face.
Being listened to is a start towards creating change.
A young woman
Mobilising young women to lead change
According to ONS consensus, there are over 4 million young women aged 18 to 30 in England and Wales. We believe they have the power and potential to lead change. We have an active network of around 10,000 young women who have used our services and shared their views and experiences to shape our work and advocate for change. But we need to grow our reach amongst young women in order to support them to influence change at scale.
To do this, we will:
- Strengthen and grow our brand and profile so we can reach more young women.
- Invest in our digital infrastructure and digital tools to mobilise young women – and then scale these to grow our community of young women who are challenging discrimination on the path to and through work.
- Work with young women to build their skills to lead change, including through developing our Influencing Planning Group of young women who design and lead our campaigns, and building our network of young women acting as media spokespeople and ambassadors.
- Mobilise young women around the General Election, encouraging them to speak to candidates and use their votes.
Young Women’s Trust helped me to find my voice – it gave me the confidence to challenge the fact that I was being paid less than a male colleague and negotiate a higher salary.
A young woman
