Occupational Mobility in Spatial Context

尽管美国妇女加入劳动力队伍的人数迅速增加，并努力消除就业中的性别歧视，但仍有很大一部分妇女受困于某些低收入职业。对与性别有关的职业隔离的分析侧重于各种制度、社会和人口因素。地理学家对就业模式和进程的地理层面进行了补充分析，重点是交通便利和工作机会的地点有限在多大程度上限制了妇女就业。该奖项支持一个项目的延续，该项目研究了马萨诸塞州伍斯特市不同职业类别的男性和女性就业的地理、社会学和个人层面。该分析的核心数据是620个家庭中工人的详细工作和居住历史。将分析这些工人所从事的工作的位置和职业状况，以确定工作过渡的性质和速度以及这些变化的原因。项目的第二部分将使用回归模型来分析个人就业的性质，包括个人属性，如年龄和教育水平，家庭属性，如婚姻状况和子女的数量和年龄，以及空间属性，如住房和工作地点的位置，以及在合理接近的范围内替代工作的位置。这部分分析中包含的数据也将用于检验关于住房重新安置对就业的影响的假设，以及关于就业机会的地理位置影响住房重新安置的方式。作为这个项目的最后一部分，研究者将调查职业流动作为一个明确设定在特定地点的社会过程。为了探索就业信息网络的地理分布，将明确讨论在家庭和工作场所收集的个人联系和信息对就业搜索的影响程度。本项目将以早期研究为基础，分析个人、社会和地理因素在个人就业和居住决策中的相互作用。将特别注意妇女和男子对其工作的性质和地点作出决定的不同方式，从而对关于与性别有关的就业模式的更广泛的文献作出贡献。

Despite rapid increases in the participation of women in the U.S. labor force and efforts to eliminate gender-related discrimination in employment, a large percentage of women remain mired in certain lower- paying occupations. Analyses of gender-related occupational segregation have focused on various institutional, social, and demographic factors. Geographers have undertaken complementary analyses of geographic dimensions of employment patterns and processes, focusing on the degree to which limited accessibility to transportation and the location of job opportunities have restricted women's employment. This award supports continuation of a project that examines the geographic, sociological, and personal dimensions of employment for both men and women in different occupational categories in Worcester, Massachusetts. Data at the core of this analysis are the detailed job and residential histories of workers in 620 households. The location and occupational status of jobs held by these workers will be analyzed to determine the nature and rate of job transitions and reasons given for those changes. A second part of the project will use regression models to analyze the nature of individual employment in terms of individual attributes like age and educational levels, household attributes like marital status and numbers and ages of children, and spatial attributes like the locations of housing and work sites and the locations of alternative jobs within reasonable proximity to homesites. Data included in this part of the analysis also will be used to test hypotheses about the impacts of housing relocations on employment and about ways that the geography of employment opportunities affects residential relocations. As a final part of this project, the investigators will investigate occupational mobility as a social process explicitly set in specific places. The degrees to which personal contacts and information gathered at both home and work sites affect employment searches will be explicitly addressed in order to explore the geography of employment-information networks. This project will build on earlier studies by analyzing the interplay of personal, social, and geographic factors in individual employment and residential decision making. Special attention will focus on the different ways that women and men make decisions about the nature and location of their jobs, thereby contributing to the broader literature on gender-related patterns of employment.