Despite rapid increases in the participation of women in the U.S. labor force and efforts to eliminate gender-related discrimination in employment, a large percentage of women remain mired in certain lower- paying occupations. Analyses of gender-related occupational segregation have focused on various institutional, social, and demographic factors. Geographers have undertaken complementary analyses of geographic dimensions of employment patterns and processes, focusing on the degree to which limited accessibility to transportation and the location of job opportunities have restricted women's employment. This award supports continuation of a project that examines the geographic, sociological, and personal dimensions of employment for both men and women in different occupational categories in Worcester, Massachusetts. Data at the core of this analysis are the detailed job and residential histories of workers in 620 households. The location and occupational status of jobs held by these workers will be analyzed to determine the nature and rate of job transitions and reasons given for those changes. A second part of the project will use regression models to analyze the nature of individual employment in terms of individual attributes like age and educational levels, household attributes like marital status and numbers and ages of children, and spatial attributes like the locations of housing and work sites and the locations of alternative jobs within reasonable proximity to homesites. Data included in this part of the analysis also will be used to test hypotheses about the impacts of housing relocations on employment and about ways that the geography of employment opportunities affects residential relocations. As a final part of this project, the investigators will investigate occupational mobility as a social process explicitly set in specific places. The degrees to which personal contacts and information gathered at both home and work sites affect employment searches will be explicitly addressed in order to explore the geography of employment-information networks. This project will build on earlier studies by analyzing the interplay of personal, social, and geographic factors in individual employment and residential decision making. Special attention will focus on the different ways that women and men make decisions about the nature and location of their jobs, thereby contributing to the broader literature on gender-related patterns of employment.
