Collaborative Research: The Demand for Female Labor

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The proposed research will compare the effects of the demand for female labor on five outcomes for men and women: earnings, economic well-being, occupational segregation, labor force participation, and education. The goal is to replicate past, individual-level, research for each outcome and then add the labor market factors developed in prior research. This multilevel design allows examination of the contextual effect of macro-level demand for female labor on gender inequality, independent of the known individual-level determinants of that inequality. Individual-level data come principally from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Census Public Use Microdata Samples. Educational outcomes will be investigated with the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. Measures of the demand for female and male labor are based on the degree to which the occupational structure is skewed towards predominantly female (or male) occupations, calculated across 261 metropolitan areas defined from the 1990 Census. This project advances knowledge in three important ways. First, it provides a systematic test of a major macro-level theory explaining gender stratification. Second, it is the first comprehensive application of recent developments in multilevel statistics to gender stratification research. Finally, it links the analysis of both situational opportunities and individual-level processes in a single design. Results will have implications not only for understanding gender stratification processes, but also to differences in economic opportunities based upon other social categories and characteristics.