If you’re a married woman living in the New York City area, there’s a better than 50 percent chance that you don’t work, according to a recent analysis of Census data by economists affiliated with the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.
More specifically, only 49 percent of white high school-educated married women in their prime working ages were holding down jobs in the New York area as of the 2000 Census. To put that in perspective, there are roughly 2 million woman over 15-years-old who are married in the New York area.
The national average for this particular demographic is 67 percent. At the other end of the spectrum is Minneapolis where almost 80 percent of these married women are employed — that’s larger than the percentage of working men aged 25 and older in the U.S.
The researchers, Dan Black of the University of Chicago, Natalia Kolesnikova of the St. Louis Fed Reserve Bank, and Lowell J. Taylor of Carnegie Mellon University, looked at the most obvious factors that could be responsible: wages, housing costs, and labor market conditions. In places where home prices or incomes are high, or the employment rate is low, you’d expect higher employment rates. But they found little evidence that these factors are influential at all.
Child-care costs also don’t seem to be a big factor since married women with and without children exhibit the same patterns.
More. The authors of the study conclude that the difference is largely due to longer commute times. Peronsally, I would want to see whether the same pattern held for non-whites before I reached any firm opinion on the likely causes.
(HT: Marginal Revolution)
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