That’s the title of an intriguing new study by my former Carnegie Mellon colleague, Lowell Taylor along with Dan Black and Natalia Kolesnikova (h/t: Allison Kemper). (Black and Taylor collaborated with Gary Gates on the “gay index” studies.) They find “an extremely large variation in female labor supply across metropolitan areas in the United States.” Looking at employment trends of married, white, non-Hispanic women ages 25-55 with a high school level education, they show that more than three-quarters (79 percent) of such women are employed in Minneapolis versus less than half (49 percent) in New York. And they find a major reason to be the cost of commuting.
Tyler Cowen counters that amenities and density would seem to matter:
“With all due respect to The Walker Art
Center, if I wanted to be a kept woman I would not start my quest in
Minneapolis. High density, as you find in Manhattan, means lots of fun things
to do in your copious free time as a kept woman and also a higher degree of
income inequality and thus the hope of snaring a rich man. There’s a reason why
they didn’t set Sex in the City in Paramus and most of the women there
will be working even when the traffic gets worse.”
The authors clearly know a lot about amenities and density. Amenities were at the center of their story about why gay men live in San Francisco. It was a over discussion of amenities and cities afterall that Gates and I met and decided to collaborate. And Kolesnikova took my PhD seminar on said while a doctoral student at CMU.
Seems to me that Columbia University’s Lena Edlund’s work may also bear here. Edlund, puzzling over the consistent pattern where single women outnumber single me in large cities world-wide, suggests a main reason may be that men essentially have to “pay” women more for marriage in these locations – the costs of having and raising kids. The study does look at the effects of highly educated power couples and concludes that such arguments don’t really help explain labor force participation of married women varies so widely by location.
The extent of the divergence is indeed very interesting, and also consistent with the general sorting of the population on economic and demographic as well as psychological dimensions.
Your thoughts?