Encouraging young researchers

How can more young people be encouraged to consider careers in science, technology, engineering and maths?

The Nuffield Foundation has come up with one potential solution – offering research placements to students in their first year of a post-16 STEM course.

Vicky Cross, a sixth-former, took up one of these four-week placements at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, UCL Institute of Education, earlier this year.

One outcome of the placement is a working paper that Vicky produced using the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70), which is following the lives of more than 17,000 people.

She looked at how couples shared domestic and childcare tasks at ages 30 and 42, and concluded that the division of labour appears to become less equal between these ages.

Her analysis involved 4,893 men and women who were married or cohabiting at both ages.

CLS Research Officer Dr Samantha Parsons comments that Vicky’s paper “serves as a helpful introduction to other researchers wanting to explore the relationship between the domestic division of labour and socio-economic characteristics in greater depth”.

Full report

‘A rise in symmetrical families: fact or fiction?’ by Vicky Cross, was published by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies in November 2014.