ABSTRACT
Many of the employers use familial ideology to frame women workers; their stereotypes about women are tied to assumptions about the ways that family arrangements will affect their productivity as employees (Pratt and Hanson 1993). In general, employers know much more about the family circumstances of their female than of their male employees: one in ten employers could provide information only about women employees, and one employer told us that: “Marital status isn’t as much a part of a man’s identity.” Only eleven out of 139 employers ventured an opinion about the workplace relevance of the marital status of male employees, and almost all of these employers preferred married men for stability and reliability. Twice as many employers made observations about the effects of marital status on women’s productivity. They were divided in their preferences for married and single women; a slight majority favored single
women, especially for professional and higher-status jobs. The one woman working as a sales representative in an advertising firm was described by her boss as “doing excellent. It’s hard to find females who are single. The job doesn’t mesh with school hours of kids. Our sales woman is mortgaged to the hilt. Nice car. Nice condo. She likes to work. She has a pleasant personality.” (This employer stated a preference for hiring women: “Women in this business do a hell of a lot better than guys do…. Pretty women do better. It’s selling the package. If it’s a nice package you buy it.” Despite these stated gender preferences, he has employed only one female salesperson (out of a total of 19), presumably because of his difficulty in finding women with no family responsibilities.)
Rather than expand on the multitude of ways that employer discriminatory attitudes and practices structure women’s and men’s work experiences-already well documented in the existing literature (e.g., Reskin and Roos 1990), we focus on the geography of employer strategies. We are particularly attentive to how employers’ sensitivity to the availability of particular types of labor influences their locational decisions, creating distinctive labor markets and literally mapping labor market segmentation into place. Their hiring practices then reinforce the localization of distinctive labor markets, as well as genderand class-based occupational segregation. At an even finer spatial scale, spatial segregation within establishments mirrors and reproduces occupational segregation.
