The Wage Effects of Residential Location and Commuting Constraints on Employed Married Women

It has been argued that greater spatial constraints are imposed on the job searches of women workers and that these greater constraints account for some of the gender wage gap. All researchers agree that women commute shorter distances to work than men. In addition, some researchers have argued from indirect evidence that two-earner households give greater weight to husbands' job opportunities when choosing a residential location. In this paper, we use data on two-earner households from the 1980 Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the US Census for the Detroit and Philadelphia SMSAs to quantify the effects of residential location and of gender differences in commuting behaviour on the gender gap in wages. First, we find that within white households wives encounter relatively greater spatial variation in wages than their husbands but that there is less of a gender difference among black households. Second, we analyse the simultaneous effects of commuting and residential constraints on wages. We find for both cities, and for both blacks and whites, that the gender wage gap is not changed in any significant way by altering women's intrametropolitan residential and job locations.