Jane Parry

Jane is a sociologist of work, who researches what work means to people, changes in ways of working, and in the various inequalities in people's experiences of work.

Her PhD looked at how Welsh coalmining communities responded to the labour market restructuring that followed the 1984/85 Miners' Strike. This study prompted a long-standing interest in occupational attachments and how these shift and interact with unpaid work, particularly when people's labour market expectations become more uncertain. In the 2000s she worked in the Employment Group at the Policy Studies Institute, focusing on disadvantage and the evaluations of labour market programmes.

Jane led the cross-institutional ESRC/UKRI project Work After Lockdown, which looked at changing expectations about work and organisational learning around the crisis-driven working from home under COVID-19. She was previously a Parliamentary Academic Fellow undertaking a project on careers after parliamentary internships, and continues to pursue applied policy research. She led research for Acas on flexible working, on young people and hybrid working in different organisations, and is currently working on female entrepreneurs in South Asia for the British Academy as well as young people and hybrid working. She is UK parliamentary thematic research led for business, economics, and trade.