Insights on Gender Through Argentinian Longitudinal Youth Research

Work that extends beyond paid employment has received relatively little attention in youth studies, supported by traditional “metaphors” of youth transition that define the path to successful adulthood with reference to integration into the labor market. This approach significantly limits the possibilities for analysis of women’s biographical paths, obscuring the dynamics of socio-gender structures that are still very active in western countries. This chapter therefore contributes to debate about youth transitions through an invitation to reflect on alternative metaphors for the analysis of young people’s transitions. We present an “intersectional” view of transitions, in which class and gender inequalities faced by young women in the Global South are made visible. Based on a qualitative sample of young women who we describe as being in late generation X, who were born around the early 1980s, we reconstruct fuller information about their transition to productive and/or reproductive work in Argentina. We discuss the different types of routes in youth transitions of women from different social sectors, and we offer a contribution to the debate about ways to analyze youth transitions considering the gender inequalities that persist in the labor market and within the framework of the persistence of traditional gender patterns.