Commuting and gender differences in job opportunities

Publication type

Journal Article

Author

Publication date

March 14, 2025

Summary:

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. We show 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 labor markets are porous, commonly used measures of employment concentration require well-defined geographical boundaries. We overcome this problem by combining employment concentration indices calculated using areas of different sizes and using the individual commuting costs as weights. We show that women have higher commuting costs and, as a result, their labor markets are smaller and their job opportunities are more limited.

Published in

Sociological Science

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 12 , p.158 -179

DOI

https://doi.org/10.15195/v12.a8

ISSN

23306696

Subjects

Notes

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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