Is Racial Exclusion Gendered? The Role of Residential Segregation in the Employment Status of Black Women and Men in the US

Abstract

This paper explores one angle of the race/gender/class intersection by examining the effect of residential segregation on black women and men's employment status in the US. Do the exclusionary mechanisms embedded in racially-based residential segregation affect black women and men's economic outcomes similarly, or are their employment outcomes differentiated by their different gender statuses? This paper lays out a theoretical framework for understanding the role residential segregation may play in shaping black men and women's labor market outcomes, outlining key mechanisms that link residential segregation to labor market inequality, highlighting the ways in which many of these mechanisms are gendered as well as racialized. This paper also offers an analytic design to test the hypotheses developed in this exploration.

Keywords:

• Race
• Gender
• Unemployment
• Labor Market Inequality
• Residential Segregation
• Occupational Segregation