This paper examines how the personal process of reflexive deliberation is shaping high-achieving, working-class women’s education and early employment trajectories, from application to elite universities through to their entry into the graduate labour market. Largely informed by Margaret Archer’s sociology of reflexivity (2003, 2007), the paper brings together findings from two qualitative research projects to offer a theoretically informed account of how classed and gendered inequalities are navigated across key educational and occupational transitions.  

Although the research is located in England, the English HE sector is not unique in experiencing high rates of female participation. In most countries across Europe, more women than men are going to and graduating from university (Eurostat, 2023; UNESCO, 2025). Concerns remain about female access to specific fields, with women persistently underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and maths (García-Peñalvo et al., 2022) and concentrated on care rather than technical courses (Barone, 2011). However, overall female dominance in the arena of HE means that it is often a key site for claims about women’s straightforward success, ambition, opportunity and freedom (Davey, 2025; Allen, 2016; Scharff, 2016). Postfeminist narratives thus position young women as agentic subjects who can ‘do, be and have’ anything they want in a world where sexism no longer exists to slow them down (Pomerantz and Raby, 2017; Kivijärvi, 2021).

This characterisation leaves little space to consider how female experiences of HE are located within the parameters of longstanding social structures. Across the European labour market, highly educated female graduates are less likely to find work than their male counterparts (Eurostats, 2025) and, once in work, they receive less pay for the same jobs (Lažetić, 2020). Accordingly, their earlier educational ‘success’ is not easily translated into the workplace. Interacting with gender are also the pressures, constraints and influences of social class. Parental wealth and education are well-known to be highly influential in shaping educational and employment outcomes (Pietrolucci, Dräger, Müller, Albertini, 2025). Likewise, the framing of working-class struggles as personal failings, rather than structural inequalities, can pathologise working-class women for belonging to both a social class and gender perceived as ‘less’ (Lawler, 1999; Reay, 2025). Little attention has, however, been paid to explaining how working-class young women with a strong track record of academic success are navigating these tensions.

This paper addresses this gap by examining the experiences of such women in the context of elite HE in England. Here, despite having a highly formalised widening participation agenda, the university system remains hierarchically stratified and deeply embedded in wider social structures (Salmi, 2018; Bathmaker, et. al 2016). With both ‘mass’ and ‘elite’ forms of HE existing simultaneously, it provides a ‘place’ for everyone but these places are not equal (Wheelahan & Moodie, 2020). Indeed, disadvantaged young people three times less likely to attend a top university than their more advantaged peers (DfE, 2025). England thus provides a particularly compelling context in which to explore social class inequalities and problematise the stereotype of trouble-free female success.

Archer’s (2003, 2007) understanding of ‘reflexivity’ provides a powerful framework for examining how working-class young women mediate between social structures and personal agency in their trajectories into and out of elite HE. These elements of social reality are not mutually constitutive of one another. Rather, Archer foregrounds the role of internal conversation to explain how individuals actively negotiate the complex structures around them. Instead of positioning working-class young women as passive bearers of gendered and classed dispositions, this paper presents them as active agents, who take a strategic approach to dealing with the constraints and opportunities they encounter in their educational and employment trajectories.

The paper draws on two qualitative research projects with high-achieving young women from working-class backgrounds. The first is a completed study of university decision making among a group of sixteen young women aged 16-18 who were intending to progress to elite UK universities. Using pens, paper and stickers, each produced a visual ‘map’ of their life and educational trajectories which was then used to guide an in-depth, face-to-face individual interview. The second is a research project in its early stages, following a group of young women as they complete their final years of study at elite universities and transition into and through the graduate labour market. Combining voice diaries and interviews, it aims to capture the dynamics of how these women define, implement and, if necessary, modify their graduate trajectories over time. Across both pieces of research, the young women had achieved (or been predicted to achieve) high grades in their end-of-school exams. They were also applying to or enrolled at some of the UK’s most academically selective universities, which demand these top grades for entry. While ‘working-class’ is a term beset by problems of definition, it is used here to refer to how these young women are typically the first generation in their families to attend university, have experienced socio-economic disadvantage and/or lived in areas of low HE participation. These measures are applied as a pragmatic solution for capturing the materiality of the young women’s backgrounds and indicate that they were bucking known trends in HE participation for working-class young people. By employing creative, biographical qualitative methods to foreground the young women’s first-person accounts of their life, educational and employment trajectories, the studies pay close attention to the mediatory process through which the young women respond subjectively to their objective circumstances (Archer, 2003). Data were analysed thematically through both an inductive approach, to delineate the girls’ circumstances and their actions and interactions with them, and a deductive approach to categorise how the girls were reflexively navigating their educational pathways. This approach allows the paper to make a theoretical contribution to the study of working-class young women’s decision making, by developing new explanatory frameworks for the reflexive ways in which they make context-dependent yet highly individualised decisions about their education and employment.

Drawing on the research findings, this paper presents examples of how the high-achieving young women in the two studies employ distinctive reflexive approaches to capitalise on enablements and circumvent obstacles which may elasticate or contract their intended transitions into and out of elite universities. On the surface, their journeys resemble well-rehearsed stories of high-achieving girls who appear able to glide through education collecting high grades and paving their own ways to bright futures (Pomerantz & Raby, 2017). Yet, as young women from working-class backgrounds who are typically the first in their families to enter HE, they are actively reworking, rather than replicating, the social worlds into which they have been born. Illustrating these complexities, the post-feminist ideals of ambition and freedom have arguably been advantageous in bringing the young women into contact with opportunities they might not otherwise have encountered as they journey into, through and out of elite universities. They construct their pathways individualistically and invest in aspirational futures. Yet this entails taking significant personal responsibility for achieving their academic and employment goals. Consequently, within these high-stakes environments, these young women are under intense pressure to perform. Reflexivity here is not simply about success. Rather, it explains how the young women navigate the risks and possibilities in their lives. Theoretically, the findings challenge dominant Bourdieusian approaches that rely heavily on cultural and social reproduction to explain classed patterns in education and employment. Such perspectives often underplay the degree of agency exercised by working-class young people whose pathways are not the ‘norm’ for their social class. By contrast, using reflexivity as a mediating process explains how individuals adapt to, negotiate and sometimes resist structural constraints. This paper thus offers a dynamic and nuanced account of working-class young women’s lives, contributing to wider debates about classed and gendered inequalities across Europe.

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