Introduction
Understanding the role of today’s young women in society is of critical importance. What are their challenges, hopes, and aspirations? How do they negotiate the established confines of female youth and challenge these confines at the same time? There still exist sociocultural norms and expectations that offer a very particular understanding of what young women and girls should be like. They are presumed to be quite knowledgeable about which route to follow in a society offering them a variety of options. They are expected to be motivated and driven individuals who seize opportunities and make a lasting impact on an ever-changing world. At the same time, the norms and expectations establish them as emotional and quite soft at times. This seems to provide them with contradictory roles as empowered and yet oppressed women. In response to this dual normative narrative of oppression and empowerment, young women have participated in inventive resistance and negotiation both openly and behind the scenes.
Are young women deliberately choosing to value their concerns and anxieties in a public or private manner? What is really going on in the lives of young women? Do they ever find themselves in a state of confusion, complexities, and concerns surrounding their everyday life experiences? In times when complex theoretical issues surrounding young women`s sense of identity, representation, and agency are perhaps the correct way forward, these questions remain unanswered. The questions posed are of utmost importance. They help to uncover the experiences and expectations placed upon young female subjects in contemporary society. This essay intends to explore the experiences and complexities of two broad groups of young women. I will explore those who are currently employed in the youth work environment and draw from their accounts, representative of the hardships surrounding young female stigma.
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Challenges Faced by Young Women
Young women today face a range of challenges as they navigate the transition into adulthood. They experience significant societal pressure to act and appear a certain way, which often leads to mental health problems, such as depression or an eating disorder. A significant amount of mental health problems stem from body image issues, and young women are more likely than males to experience serious psychological distress after comparing their bodies to unrealistic beauty standards. Unrealistic portrayals of women, and the upward comparison to these portrayals by young women, have been linked to low self-esteem, negative mood, and feelings of self-disgust. Worries about sexual assault, violence in public and domestic spaces, and the need to regulate 'body work' to mitigate discrimination can also be hazardous to a young woman's mental health.
Young women are more likely than young men to be jobless, and there is a demonstrated pattern of gender discrimination in hiring due to the increased casualization of labor and part-time work. They work in part-time, casual, or caring roles at a higher rate than young men, which often lack the same opportunities for training, advancement, and permanent employment. This can be seen in the fact that only half of women aged 18–24 earn more than $26 per hour, and 71 percent of women are in part-time employment compared to 55 percent of men. This contributes to a gender wage gap among younger workers, which is 14.1 percent among university graduates and 8.4 percent among vocational graduates. Additionally, women are less likely than men to find work in their area of qualification.
Empowerment and Representation
In the past decade or so, the progression of various movements has acted to engage, represent, and support the rights and well-being of women. In the absence of a developed understanding of the issues, young women are prone to falling into spaces where they are harassed, misinformed, patronized, and made to feel that they belong more to their individual cultures than to the global field in which many communities and possibilities intersect. Increasing knowledge, empowerment, and presenting supportive activism and advocacy open up a plethora of pathways for young women. Narratives of empowerment have emerged in recent years to counter the conversation about the challenges facing young women.
Issues of misrepresentation in several domains are of national and international concern. These young women rightly argue that they are not recognized positively in dominant global narratives and that they face issues of oppression, marginalization, and prejudice in various domains. There is a growing concern within the international research literature that the portrayal of young women has the power to impact the way they see themselves or, as an activist states, how we think of ourselves. Empowering social media and personal narratives inform us how such encounters permit young women to tell their stories in their own terms. The narratives of empowered young women that we encounter in the media are important representations for members of society. Receiving positive media attention suggests a positive, active, and strong persona that effectively challenges popular representations of passive, failing, and vulnerable individuals.
Empowerment narratives enable us to enter the lived worlds of these young women, providing serious challenges to those who demonized them. Our research indicates that empowerment shaped these three young women's social activism and their parenting and relationships. Empowerment also had implications for curricula, academic achievement, and classroom interactions. We have produced a resource exploring diversity in aesthetic and personal contexts. We urged you to take these areas of fit, interest, and investment and unpack them. These are the themes that weave through the young women's papers. For the young women, cultivating their sexual orientation means an autonomous look away from the mainstream picture of our many-voiced cultures and faiths in which young people live. Your desires could lead to aspirations and dreams being changed. One pointed out: "I can develop a path for myself - whether I am following God or not - no matter who turns their back on me. It's still possible."
Intersectionality and Young Women
The concept of intersectionality brings to light the fact that our social identities are interconnected. Our experiences cannot be understood in isolation because they are fundamentally shaped by the fact that we are gendered, raced, classed, disabled, and/or sexualized beings from the moment we are born. Many mainstream announcements of the 'experiences of young women' have failed to account for these intersections of power and privilege, or have presented them as hierarchical. An awareness of the inequalities and systemic discriminations that occasion different experiences of the world for different groups of young women has the potential to make visible the challenges and obstacles faced by some of them. For example, which young woman gets to participate in the public sphere, and to what extent she is allowed to take part in decision-making processes, providing her perspectives on what it means to be a young woman in contemporary societies, according to their specific cultural, historic, economic, and ideological contexts?
In this vein, some have underlined the emancipatory dimension of intersectionality by foregrounding the voice of the marginalized. Because the dynamics that oppress different young women are different, their collective claims for empowerment constitute different sets of voices. Integrating these different voices amalgamates the complexities that enable different emerging feminisms to construct inclusive policies, invest in advocacy, and foster other forms of so-called 'bottom-up' and 'inclusive' processes. However, caution should be taken not to over-read the emancipatory potential of intersectionality. For instance, this can easily lead to the essentialization of the perspectives created by different groups, resulting in a simplified way of understanding their needs and capabilities. Furthermore, the various voices that are supposedly represented might actually exclude some young women. Therefore, we prefer to conceptualize empowerment in a non-essentialist manner.
Conclusion
The lives and experiences of young women and girls in Australia and around the world present a complex picture, with myriad sites of possibility and exclusion. The focus has been on the challenges that need to be addressed in the lives and in society, but it is also important to acknowledge the empowerment and representation of young women that have been profound in this generation. From girls’ activism to the representation of girls in film and to unique forms of media productions by girls, important changes have been made that shape the articulation of self and life choices. One of the ‘calls to arms’ that emerges from the commentary is the need for deeper and sustained attention to the needs of young women. The development of research that focuses on the intersectional analysis of these young women is a more recent imperative, drawing more deeply from animal and human rights research, advocacy, and social movements.
It is evident that there is much more to be done by scholars, advocates, and practitioners from a range of fields. Attention to material support is one facet of this, as demonstrated by the insights on the educational engagement and disengagement of a group of very young Congolese girls living in a refugee camp and seeking resettlement as humanitarian migrants. To achieve this goal, a number of policy shifts and adjustments were necessary to ensure that the entire group of girls could enroll and remain in primary school. Research that problematizes and addresses the policies and services in schools and health and in educational settings available for various groups is yet to be articulated.
Thus, the potential scholarship that could illuminate the day-to-day lived experience and demonstrate how and where young women might be collateral visitors in their daily lives is yet to be drawn out and prepared for local, national, and international audiences. A key objective of this collection on young women is to generate knowledge and inspire scholarly, political, and public debate about issues pertaining to the lived experience and capability of young women to participate freely and fully in contemporary societies. Developing understanding about the complex lives of young women and, more particularly, the structures that work to compound their disadvantages, is a critical prerequisite to fostering the resilient spirit envisioned in which women are equipped to confidently approach life’s complexities and take advantage of its opportunities. Working at the intersection of theoretical, political, sociological, and cultural studies, this collection also aims to engage the broad commonwealth of interests that exist between the academy, policymakers, and the general public regarding young women’s life experiences, opportunities, and well-being.
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