Gender and Suburban Wages

Virginia L. Carlson and Joseph Persky ()

Economic Geography, 1999, vol. 75, issue 3, 237-253

Abstract: In the monocentric model of urban development, jobs are clustered in the central business district and the price of land and housing decreases as one moves farther from the city center. Firms that elect to locate away from the city center can pay their workers lower wages because workers do not bear the cost of commuting downtown. These intraurban wage differentials have been credited with contributing to the suburbanization of jobs. Recent research on spatial constraints for certain classes of workers suggests, however, that the monocentric model and associated wage differentials may be incomplete. Urban/suburban wage differentials may exist only for certain kinds of workers who are more limited spatially in their commute, such as second-earner women. In this case, women’s wage rates by job location would be much more distance-sensitive than would men’s. Using data from the 1990 Public Use Microdata Sample for the Chicago metropolitan area, we investigate wages by work location. We find that although there are certain categories of occupations where both men and women experience wage differentials, overall, women working in the suburbs encounter wages that are 7.8 percent less than their counterparts downtown, whereas for men the differential is only 1.2 percent.

Date: 1999
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DOI: 10.1111/j.1944-8287.1999.tb00078.x

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