Creativity gaps and gender gaps: women, men and place in the United States

Abstract

This article situates Florida's (2002) work on creative regions in the United States in the context of a critical discussion of place and gender and investigates the gender–class structure of his most and least creative regions. It analyzes the distribution of creative class, working class and service class occupations by gender within those 21 regions as well as earnings, household income, poverty and educational attainment using data from the US Census 2000. Women and men are compared within and across the two categories of most and least creative regions. The major finding is that the gender gap in earnings within categories of regions is larger than the creativity gap, i.e. the earnings gap within genders across regions. As new technology industries have been layered over old industries, altering spatial divisions of labor, gendered labor remains integrated in largely traditional ways.

Este artículo sitúa el trabajo de Florida (2002) sobre regiones creativas en los Estados Unidos en el contexto de una discusión crítica de lugar y género, e investiga la estructura de género-clase de sus regiones más y menos creativas. Analiza la distribución de las ocupaciones de la clase creativa, la clase trabajadora y la clase de servicios, por género, dentro de aquellas 21 regiones, así como también el ingreso individual, del hogar, la pobreza y el nivel educacional, utilizando datos del censo 2000 de los EE.UU. Mujeres y hombres son comparados dentro y entre dos categorías de región más creativa y región menos creativa. El resultado más importante es que la diferencia de ingreso entre géneros dentro de las categorías de regiones es mayor que las diferencias en la creatividad, o sea la diferencia de ingresos para el mismo género en las diferentes regiones. A medida que las nuevas industrias de tecnología se han ido superponiendo con las viejas industrias, alterando las divisiones espaciales del trabajo, el trabajo generizado permanece integrado en formas mayormente tradicionales.

Keywords:

• creative class
• creative economy
• creative regions
• occupational gender segregation
• place and gender

Keywords:

• clase creativa
• economía creativa
• regiones creativas
• segregación ocupacional por género
• lugar y género

Acknowledgements

This is a revision of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Urban Affairs Association, Washington, DC, 1 April 2004. The authors thank Wayne Usui for technical advice and Deborah Dixon and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments regarding various aspects of the manuscript.

Notes

1. Rausch (2007, Tables 8–11) tested components of Florida's index and other variables as predictors of gross metropolitan product (GMP) per capita in 2000 and percent change in GMP 2000 to 2004/5 in 271 US metro areas. The significant positive effect of relative size of the creative class on GMP per capita disappeared when educational attainment and geographic region of country were added to the models, both of which had significant positive effects. Technology, as measured by the Milken Index, was the more consistent predictor than the creative class in this series of tests, although smaller than educational attainment and region. When GMP growth was the dependent variable, the relative size of the creative class had a significant but surprisingly negative effect. Immigration, racial/ethnic tolerance and region of country were more consistent predictors of GMP growth. A longer historical perspective, however, might yield different results.

2. All data on New Orleans in Florida's analysis as well as ours are pre-Hurricane Katrina.

3. The presence of a state capital within metropolitan areas was not a significant predictor of GMP per capita or percentage change in GMP, however, in a test of components of Florida's creativity index and other variables (Rausch 2007, Tables 8–11).

4. Multiple analysis of variance and analysis of variance test for significant differences of means by comparing variances. By partitioning the total variation into different sources, between-groups effects can be compared to within-group effects.

5. Eta squared is similar to R squared in that it is a measure of the proportion of variance in the dependent variable explained by the independent variable/s.

6. F is similar to t in that it is a statistic used to determine probability.