“Go West, Young Woman?”: The Geography of the Gender Wage Gap through the Great Recession

PWP-CCPR-2016-039

Abstract

Despite headline-grabbing accounts of the ‘Man-cession’ and childless metropolitan-dwelling women who earn more than men, the gender wage gap remains persistent. The spatiality of the gender wage gap has received little attention, despite geographers’ historic concerns with patterns of inequality under economic shifts and economic sociologists’ increasingly geographic focus. In this paper, I ask whether, where, and how the gender wage gap has changed with the recession. Using American Community Survey pooled surveys for 2005-7 and 2011-13, I model counterfactual wage distributions for full-time male and female workers in the top 100 metropolitan areas of the U.S., controlling for education, age, and experience. Results indicate that gender inequality is spatially polarizing, both across the wage distribution and across the  country, and that the recession exacerbates this pattern. Gender gaps decline most in the Rustbelt, but show relative increases in many Western metropolitan areas (especially the Pacific Northwest and northern California). Further, the declines are mostly amongst below-median earning workers, whereas the increases are most likely to be at the 75th or 90th percentiles. The combination of geographical and distributional analysis makes clear that the gender wage gap, even adjusting for labor force characteristics, remains strong. It also reveals a more thorough picture of how gender inequality shifts with the recession, especially as previous patterns of uneven development under economic restructuring are still evident here. Most importantly, the analysis signposts regions of emerging gender inequality where relative gender equality is often presumed, suggesting critical research directions for feminist and economic geographers.