Traversing time and gender: Australian young people's participation

This paper details the participatory behaviour of Australian young people through an examination of the relationship between gender, awareness of time constraints and participation. It engages with existing feminist critiques of how participation is conceptualized and recent research that looks at the effects of both structure and agency in the lives of young people. The paper is based on an original survey of 18-year-old 34-year-old Australians and shows that rather than this age group having homogeneous (or even negligible) participatory experiences, four distinct participatory typologies emerge. These four typologies are labelled as Activist, Communitarian, Party and Individualistic. Two participatory types, Activist and Communitarian, are differentiated by gender, with women being more participatory. I argue that an understanding of the complex relationship between gender and participation is enhanced when parenting commitments, paid work commitments, and the awareness of the relationship between time and participation are included in analysis.