ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that although gentrification coincided with a rise in the number of women in high-end service sector jobs, the increasing number of women in the workforce was as much the result of economic necessity as feminist liberation. The gentrification of the city that was hypothesized as a strategy to undermine patriarchy has done little to dismantle the gendered division of labor and wage gap. While coding urban space as feminine has been a useful strategy to accomplish gentrification, norms and expectations in the labor market of the gentrified city remain gendered and highly masculinist. The central labor market transformation that predicated the existence of gentrification was the decline of industry and the shift to service sector employment. The gendered division of labor and the undervaluing of care work continues to create sexist cities, a problem that gentrification, once thought of as a potential solution, has helped to reinforce, albeit in different ways from those of the industrial city.
