Why Do So Few Women Work in New York ... ?

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?

Comments

[The City Gal]

I have dedicated the last couple of years of my life to figuring this out.

What I read in The Logic of Life (by Tim Harford) made the most sense to me. He is brilliant!

As long as I lived in the city, I saw more women at clubs, guyms, bars bookstores and even offices. There were women (mostly single) every where and not enough men!

I went to a few singles events recently and 75% were educated accomplished single women living and working in the city. (Dating agencies are making a fortune from their high-income female clients)

Many single educated women are eyeing corporate jobs. They also want a social life. They like to live where they can walk to their favorite spa, gym, bookstore, theater, bar, restaurant and cafe.

It's true! It sounds a lot like Sex in the City (without all that drama and excitement, of course).

Also, as Tim Harford has pointed out, these single women are looking for an educated employed progressive partner. Where else would you look for such person other than a big City?

The problem is that the single female population is smaller than one of the single male.

If anyone knows how this paradox can be solved, let me know, too!

[Matt]

City Gal, I'm a bit confused by your second-last paragraph -- isn't it that the single female population is larger than the single male one?

And are you saying the singles events have a 1:3 male:female ratio? That would be very interesting, because I think online dating sites typically have around a 10:1 male:female ratio. (I realize the audiences are different, but still, it's quite a flip.) Maybe women and men have different ideas of where to look, and end up not meeting?

[The City Gal]

Matt,

Sorry, "smaller" was a typo. I mean "larger".

About internet dating sites, I am not sure if that's true. If you search for males and females "within" the city, my experience is that there are more women online.