A new study. Commuting and Gender Differences in Job Opportunities, by ISER’s Dr Silvia Avram has found that commuting patterns for women have an impact on their job opportunities.
The study, published in the journal Sociological Science, investigated how women tend to commute shorter distances and earn lower wages. The theory suggests that more mobile workers are likely to command higher wages, in part because they have access to more job opportunities. This new study shows how information on employment concentration and commuting patterns can be linked to build an index of labor market opportunities, using linked administrative and household survey data from the UK. Although labour markets are porous, commonly used measures of employment concentration require well-defined geographical boundaries. Dr Avram’s study overcomes this problem by combining employment concentration indices calculated using areas of different sizes and using the individual commuting costs as weights. The study finds that women have higher commuting costs and, as a result, their labour markets are smaller and their job opportunities are more limited.
The study used data from Understanding Society, the UK Household Longitudinal Study, led by a team of scientific experts at ISER, alongside the Business Structure Database
“Our results highlight a structural disadvantage that women, and especially mothers, face in the labour market. Higher commuting costs restrict the pool of job opportunities available to women with consequences for gender pay inequality.
“Addressing women’s structural disadvantage in the labour market will require policies that expand their job opportunities either by reducing commuting costs or by weakening the relationship between commuting costs and job opportunities.
“Enhanced transport infrastructure, better childcare provision, and policies that aim to re-balance work and family commitments such as teleworking or a four-day working week should all help reduce the structural disadvantages associated with unpaid domestic work.
“Meanwhile, we find that women and mothers potentially anticipate some of the constraints they are likely to face and respond by sorting themselves into service industries, which are more geographically dispersed. Yet, it is not clear to what extent sorting accounts for the entirety of the patterns we observe. Reduced job opportunities are likely to impact wages both via sorting and depressed bargaining power. Future research should establish the importance of each of these two channels, as policy implications are likely to be very different.”
Read the full paper here