Economic Geography

Linda McDowell

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Feminist economic geographies
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that mean that women’s work – and so feminist arguments about its construc-
tion (for example the association of gendered traits with particular kinds of work
and the under-enumeration of ‘women’s work’ – began to loom larger on the
landscape of economic geography. In the advanced industrial economies, tech-
nological change, new international divisions of labour, capital mobility and new
state policies were connected with the transformation of the labour markets in
these economies. Women began to be constructed and officially recognised as
waged workers as well as domestic labourers in state discourses (of course women’s
waged work has been a key part of the economy across the centuries) and their
efforts were seen as crucial to economic growth and efficiency (McDowell
2005a). From the mid twentieth century onwards, the rhetoric of women’s ‘dual
roles’ proved an acceptable way of constructing women as part-time workers,
able to combine their primary role as housewives and mothers – a domestic
ideology with a long tradition in Britain but which took an extreme form after
the end of the Second World War, written into the postwar settlement as women’s
duty (Lewis 1991) – with earning a wage. Both the economy and the family
seemed to prosper on this division in the postwar era as consumer industries
expanded and individual families began to live in more comfortable ways, in part
supported by women’s ability to earn a second wage in part-time jobs. 
This division of labour, however, began to flounder as deindustrialisation
ripped apart the postwar compact, the families largely dependent on the wages
of the male breadwinner and as new forms of service work began to expand.
Here, the male-dominated trade union movement was slow to see that its
complacent acceptance of lower wages for women and the development of female
ghettoes in service sector employment – in the semi-professions for example of
nursing, primary school teaching and social work as well as in the expanding
lower echelons of service sector work – child care, retail, leisure and so on –
meant that these sectors were able to be constructed as ‘women’s work’ and so
rejected as potential jobs by unemployed men who had previously worked in more
masculinised forms of heavy labour. In addition these female ghettoes included
mainly low paid jobs. As a result, although more and more women entered the
labour market, often in casualised or part-time jobs, the overall incomes of the
poorest families dependent on wage labour began to fall. Toynbee (2003) and
Ehrenreich’s (2001) recent exposes of the most exploitative end of these female-
dominated servicing jobs in the UK and USA respectively provide shocking
evidence of how the feminisation of the economy is related to growing income
inequality. Meanwhile, other women – the better educated and more affluent
who have benefited from the rising rates of educational participation – have
begun to enter high status work in the service sector in growing numbers,
moving into the professions, into law, medicine, banking, and the universities as
well as into new sectors in the information economy and the cultural industries.
The expansion of women’s waged labour thus provided an impetus to its analysis by
economic geographers, albeit not necessarily drawing on feminist explanations.
As a consequence, economic geographers interested in the transformation of
their national economies, began to address new questions about regional change,

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Linda McDowell
organisational cultures, occupational segregation and the future shape of and
spatial differentiation within service-dominated economies. And in this work, the
very fact that many more workers were women, that women often worked part-
time to allow for their continued responsibilities for their families, that they
might not want to or be able to travel long distances to work raised new ques-
tions that had seemed irrelevant in earlier studies. Thus, for example, in a fasci-
nating case-study of the connections between recruitment policies and locational
strategies, Kristen Nelson (1987) showed how high tech firms in the Bay Area 
in California explicitly searched for and changed location in order to attract a
certain fraction of the female labour force; reliable but unambitious middle class
and middle aged women for clerical positions. Susan Hanson and Gerry Pratt
(1995) in their influential study of the labour market in Gloucester Mass looked
at the connections between occupational segregation, travel to work patterns and
household labours, Milkman (1987) showed how local labour market conditions
especially the demand for labour influenced the ways in which firms in postwar
America came to different decisions about the differential pay rates between men
and women. In the UK, Doreen Massey (1984) and McDowell and Massey
(1984) looked at regional divisions of labour and the connections with women’s
domestic responsibilities. Massey (1995) then developed these ideas in an explo-
ration of the connections between gendered roles and responsibilities in the
emerging employment practices of the hi-tech industries then expanding around
the university town of Cambridge and I looked at new gender divisions of labour
in the City of London as deregulation after 1988 led to high demand for labour
(McDowell 1997). 
In all this work, what distinguished it from other studies of regional development
and labour market changes was explicit attention to the causes and consequences
of the gender division of labour in the workplace and in the home. Feminist
economic geographers built new ways of understanding gender divisions of labour
exploring why women undertake the majority of domestic labour and caring for
dependents, why men and women do different jobs in the labour market, under
different conditions and for different rewards, but also began to ask how assump-
tions about the characteristics of femininity and masculinity are themselves writ-
ten into job descriptions, embedded within the cultural practices of capitalist
organisations and reflected in different rates of financial remuneration.