Commuting and gender differences in job opportunities

Seminar summary

Women tend to both commute shorter distances and earn lower wages. While this relationship is often assumed causal, empirical evidence on the mechanisms is lacking. Theory suggests mobile workers are likely to command higher wages, in part because they have access to more employers. We show how information on employment concentration and commuting patterns can be linked to build an index of labour market opportunities, using linked administrative and household survey data from the UK. While labour markets are porous, commonly used measures of employment concentration require well-defined geographical boundaries. We overcome this problem by combining employment concentration indices calculated using areas of different size, using the individual commuting costs as weights. We find that women have higher commuting costs and, as a result, their labour markets are smaller and more concentrated.

How to attend this seminar

This seminar is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

We welcome you to join us online on Wednesday 30 October 2024 at 12pm.

Online joining details will follow shortly.

Please direct any questions to the CWOS Seminar organisers Dave Watson and Melissa Tyler.

Speaker bio

Dr Silvia Avram

Silvia Avram is an applied social scientist with an interdisciplinary approach that mixes theories and methods from sociology, social policy, and economics to examine substantive questions. Her research focuses on better understanding the causes of income and labour market inequalities and the role played by institutions, norms, and policies in shaping them. She uses quantitative methods and micro-data -primarily household and labour market surveys but also administrative and experimental data- to carry out the empirical work.