I’d like to highlight an academic paper I believe uses an unusually clever approach to answering an important question in how men and women value amenities. This is by Lockwood Reynolds at Kent State and Amanda Weinstein at Akron.
The paper is on gender differences in quality of life and preferences for location-specific amenities across cities. It is a technical study, and pay walled behind the Journal of Regional Science, but I interviewed Amanda about it on my TV show, The Roundtable.
She gives a great explanation of the work, but I won’t pass on a quick summary.
I love this paper because it measures Quality of Life using the ‘unexplained’ home price premium and ‘unexplained’ wage premium for individual men and women (unmarried) in U.S. cities. They used unmarried individuals so as not to cloud the family decision complexity (in my personal n=1 sample, the housing choice is always that of the woman).
A high ‘unexplained’ home price means individuals value that place more highly than the home characteristics suggest. A low ‘unexplained’ price means individuals value a place less than the home characteristics suggest.
The reverse is true in labor markets. Workers will demand a wage premium to live in an unpleasant place, but accept a lower wage than would be expected to live in a place they value. Using the average difference between the unexplained home price and wage data for all the observed single men and women in each city yields a discrete measure of quality of life.
Lockwood and Amanda then measure what men and women like that are similar and different. You can look through this table to get a sense that mostly men and women like the same things, particularly in natural amenities. Bigger differences in endogenous (gov’t or private sector) amenities. Particularly crime.
The authors also write about specific amenities, which I’ll suggest you contact them about, because it is potentially very important for cities to understand. This is just such a darned well executed and interesting piece of research, I have to leave a bit of a teaser for you.
Note: I work with Amanda on Quality of Life research, so if you have questions about it more generally, go to this website to learn more and contact folks who can help you navigate the issues.
The reason the individual characteristics are so critical for community developers to understand is that the places women preferred are doing much better than the cities men prefer. This figure (Figure 4 from their paper) shows the population growth rate of IUS cities from 2000 to 2018 based upon whether or not men or women had higher Quality of Life rankings for each.
There’s several hidden gems in this paper, but one extraordinarily cool one is that they compared every city in the U.S. by gender preferences. And, here’s is that graph, which demonstrates that men and women have pretty similar interests. The paper has a list of the top and bottom places by gender preferences.
But, one place really stood out; Gadsden, Alabama. Women really, really don’t like Gadsden, but why? Well, that fair city is famous for having a Goodyear factory where this woman worked.
This is Lilly Ledbetter, whose lawsuit against Goodyear eventually led to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay act. Crazy how good this theoretical and econometric model is to find this place.
This led the author’s to expand their work into gender attitudes and quality of life. This could’ve been an entire Poly Sci dissertation in itself, it is that clever and well done. This is going to be uncomfortable for a lot of folks, but the measurement of these attitudes and the data on the gender representation are pretty solid.
You should watch Amanda answer my questions about them above, but suffice it to say, quality of life is a complex and important aspect of municipal economic development. I think it will eventually revolutionize how successful places see themselves. Unsuccessful places will keep with the status quo.
And, for what it is worth, the Midwest is over-represented in the bottom 20 places in the country. A whopping 13 out of the bottom 20 places for both men and women are in one of five Midwestern states. There’s lots of work to be done on this issue across the Midwest.