Off to Market: Neighborhood and Individual Employment Barriers for Women in 21st Century American Cities

This paper endeavors to create a better understanding of the barriers to employment faced by disadvantaged urban women in the post-welfare reform era. Using data from the Project on Devolution and Urban Change, a unique geographically-linked, longitudinal, multi-city set of survey data, logistic regression models weigh the relative importance of individual barriers to employment (poor health, childcare and family responsibilities, etc.) and contextual or neighborhood barriers to employment (poverty rate, joblessness rate, etc.) on labor market outcomes. Results reveal that several neighborhood characteristics are predictive of employment, including automobile access, female-headedness, vacancy, and disorder. Results suggest a more complex, nuanced interplay between neighborhood-level variables and individually-measured variables in preventing some women from obtaining both modestly paying employment with few allocated hours of work per week, and also better-paying jobs with more hours of work per week.