Suburban Pink Collar Ghettos: The Spatial Entrapment of Women?

The restructuring of the U.S. economy has resulted in the expansion and suburbanization of office employment. One theory is that an attraction of suburban locations is their large supply of women whose domestic responsibilities restrict their employment prospects and job-search area, spatially entrapping themin their neighborhood of residence. Firms employing large numbers of pink collar workers may relocate to the suburbs to employ these spatially entrapped women. I examine the applicability of the spatial-entrapment thesis underpinning much of the literature on the changing geography of office locations, gender divisions of labor, and urban labor markets. I use “triangulation” as a research strategy that involves the analysis of a variety of overlapping work-place and residential-based commuting studies and indepth, interactive interviews with the personnel managers of suburban offices and suburban women employed as clerical workers. The results show that, contrary to “conventional wisdom,” commutes and that neither the presence of another adult nor children in the household decreases a woman's work-trip. A reconceptualization of the spatial-entrapment thesis is offered, which attempts to untagle the relationship between women's commutes and the extent to which they are enmeshed in an evolving, complex web of localized relations.