Time-geographic approach to investigating gender difference in accessing employment opportunities in a metropolitan area

Abstract

Gender inequality in employment remains an ongoing social issue in the United States. Although women's participation in the labor market has improved in the recent decades, the issue now is often manifested as occupational gender segregation, which is highlighted with women's overrepresentation in the service-oriented and lower-paying jobs. Taking a geographic perspective, numerous studies have focused on examining the statistical relationship between indicators of gender roles and commuting lengths to understand how traditional gender roles limit women's job accessibility. Nevertheless, the existing methods cannot explicitly explain the mechanism of how gender roles constrain women's time and lead to their disadvantageous status in accessing jobs. In addition, the spatial distribution of jobs, which also have significant influence on people's job accessibilities, cannot be fully incorporated in the commuting-based statistical analysis. Based on a time-geographic approach, this research proposes a new methodology framework to study the differences of men and women's space-time accessibilities to employment opportunities in a metropolitan area. It aims at offering an explicit explanation on how gender roles and job distribution patterns integrally function and impose different levels of space-time constraints on men and women's work activities, which leads to gendered accessibility patterns. Under the guidance of the proposed time-geographic methodology framework, simulated urban models, representing various job distribution patterns of monocentric and polycentric cities, are generated to help build knowledge on the connection between urban form and job accessibilities for men and women. In addition, the new methodology framework is also applied to a case study in Chicago Metropolitan Area, for the purpose of not only achieving further understanding on how the more irregular job distribution patterns in a real-world city will influence space-time accessibility to jobs, but also examining whether/how the gendered job accessibility patterns would contribute to the uneven distributions of men and women across occupations. The research is expected to provide useful insights on comprehending and assessing the situations of the occupational gender gap issues, and facilitate urban policy makers and planners to develop effective plans to improve gender employment equity in a city.