Gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the proportion of youth neither in employment nor education at the start of the school year

This article examines the period of September to October 2020, which signalled the beginning of new school year and also the start of the second wave of COVID-19 in Canada. It illuminates the decisions that youth (and, in the case of secondary students, their parents) made about their schooling, and how the combination of these possibly difficult decisions, with the unprecedented drops in youth employment, affected the proportion of youth who were that youth not in employment, education or training - NEET.