Giving Compass' Take:

• In 2017, a report found that working mothers with degrees were struggling to find jobs that could accommodate their schedules and give them flexible work hours. 

• What are the alternative options for mothers who have to support their families? How can daycare centers and local job organizations help improve women's career paths?

• Read about how to create a pipeline for more women in business. 


Issy Mason has an upper-second class degree in languages and international business from Sheffield Hallam University, speaks fluent Spanish and has completed two internships in marketing, one of them overseas.

She achieved all this alongside having become a mother at 19 - but her skills and qualifications seem to count for little in her hunt for a graduate job - because she needs a flexible work pattern.

She says the only jobs open to her flexible enough to fit around school pick-up for her six-year-old daughter offer zero-hours contracts.

The most recent Higher Education Statistics Agency figures show 3,665 female graduates were on zero-hours contracts six months after leaving university in 2016.

An analysis of long-term data from the University of Essex's Understanding Society Study, for the Young Women's Trust, indicated young women with degrees were as likely to be jobless as men with no qualifications, often because they were parents.

Young women are working hard because they want to become financially independent. Instead, however, many are getting stuck on low pay, in insecure work and, in many cases, shut out of the jobs market altogether," said YWT chief executive Carole Easton.

"Giving young women the support they need to find secure, well-paid work will not only help them to become financially independent but will benefit businesses and the economy too."

Read the full article on working mothers by Judith Burns at BBC