Gender and suburban wages

In the monocentric model of urban development, jobs are clustered in the ce ntral business district and the price of land and housing decreases as one moves farther from the city center. Firms that elect to locate away from th e city center can pay their workers lower wages because workers do not bear the cost of commuting downtown. These intraurban wage differentials have b een credited with contributing to the suburbanization of jobs. Recent resea rch on spatial constraints for certain classes of workers suggests, however , that the monocentric model and associated wage differentials may be incom plete. Urban/suburban wage differentials may exist only for certain kinds o f workers who are more limited spatially in their commute, such as second-e arner women. In this case, women's wage rates by job location would be much more distance-sensitive than would men's. Using data from the 1990 Public Use Microdata Sample for the Chicago metropolitan area, we investigate wage s by work location. We find that although there are certain categories of o ccupations where both men and women experience wage differentials, overall, women working in the suburbs encounter wages that are 7.8 percent less tha n their counterparts downtown, whereas for men the differential is only 1.2 percent.