Assessing the Impact of Location on Women's Labor Market Outcomes: A Methodological Exploration (original) (raw)

2010, Geographical Analysis

Assessing the Impact of Location on Women's Labor Market Outcomes: A Methodological Exploration Location and the nature of locally available employment opportunities is believed to shape labor force participation, job type, and wages. Analysts investigating this issue have encountered problems in operationalizing the concept of ''locally available employment opportunities." W e first review the grounds f o r expecting a relationship between local context and employment outcomes f o r women and then critically assess the methods and measures that analysts have used to explore the relationship. Finally, we describe a new approach f o r measuring local employment context that consists of a fine-scaled measure individually tailored f o r each woman in the sample. Using discriminant analysis we ask whether the spatial variables measuring local employment context are important determinants of women's employment in female-dominated occupations. The results suggest that f o r most groups of women (dejined by city or suburban residence and by sociodemographics) the spatial variables are not important. For well-educated, part-time employed women with young children, however, living in an area rich in female-dominated job opportunities increases the likelihood of having a j o b in a gender-typical occupation; f o r these women, the local employment context does affect labor market outcomes. One question that has intrigued geographers and other social scientists for decades is how location affects labor market outcomes (for example, labor force participation, occupational status, and wages). Many have observed that what someone ends up doing-whether or not a person even has a job, whether that job is full time or part time, the kind of work one does, how well paid the job is-depends on where that someone lives. However, assessing the impact of location on labor market outcomes is more difficult than making the observation that there seems to be a relationship. The authors thank Phil Salopek and Phil Fulton of the U.S. Bureau of Census Journey-to-Work Division for providing the data from the special runs. Ibipo Johnston-Anumonwo participated in the earliest discussions of the idea for this paper, and Gerry Pratt was integral to the Worcester study, from which the data are drawn. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.