Multiple Dimensions of Gender (Dis)Parity: A County-Scale Analysis of Occupational Attainment in the USA, 2019

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article is original and innovative in its subject matter and methodology of approaching the object of research.
The structure of the text is adequate. The hypotheses, objectives and methodology are coherent and are related to the results obtained. The methodology used is appropriate to achieve the objectives. The results obtained are in line with the expected objectives. The conclusions are relevant to the academic and professional environment.

Author Response

Response: Thank you so much for your positive and encouraging note. In response to other reviewers, I have added many new literature and have revised and revamped the paper. I hope you will approve my revised version too. The length ahs increased, but this was needed to respond to few concerns by others.

I am attaching the final version of manuscript on the main submission. For your reading, I attach the pdf of the version that shows all RED mark-ups. Hope this helps you to see the revisions. 

Thank you so much for reviewing and giving me encouraging notes. I appreciate it. ---

Sincerely,

Author #1

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

this article examines gendered dimensions of occupational (dis)parity across the counties of the USA and their relationships with educational attainment. This is an important topic and the method and analysis are solid. Overall well written too. However, about the unit of analysis of counties, the article may some justifications and may want to compare the merits and demerits of a unit of analysis selected.  I suggest adding a couple of sentences that justify the unit of analysis based on a couple of previous works such as "What is the ‘neighbourhood in neighbourhood satisfaction? Comparing the effects of structural characteristics measured at the micro-neighbourhood and tract levels" "Ho, A. T. K., & Cho, W. (2017). Government communication effectiveness and satisfaction with police performance: A large‐scale survey study. Public Administration Review, 77(2), 228-239" and "Bearak, J. M., Burke, K. L., & Jones, R. K. (2017). Disparities and change over time in distance women would need to travel to have an abortion in the USA: a spatial analysis. The Lancet Public Health, 2(11), e493-e500." Another concern is the fit of this article with the journal Sustainability. sustainable economic development was mentioned a couple of times, but overall I don't find any convincing argument about how gender economic parity is related to sustainable economic development--it is intuitive to link this relationship but still, I would like to see better justification about the link between gender disparity and sustainability. 

Author Response

Response: Thank you for your positive criticism. First, I have thoroughly edited the whole apper three times already. I took care of the grammatical errors and some awkward sentences to the best of my ability. I feel satisfied with the revised version. I sincerely hope you too will love the revised final product, which has indeed become lengthier as I had to add many new literature (10 more papers) to address all the concerns that you had.

This suggestion about ‘why county as a scale’ is well taken. I wasn’t sure how much details I should have gone into, given that this is a manuscript and not a thesis. However, I used all the three papers suggested by you/this reviewer. In addition, I have added several more. I am pasting below the major re-write in research design section here – specifically those paragraphs that deal with county as a scale argument. I hope the reviewer/you are satisfied with this addition. This indeed, increased the total length of this paper, to now counting a total of 9,290 words. Indeed, I have added almost 550-600 words toward providing this county versus other scales – argument.

The following additional papers have been cited when writing these – these concern scale issues.  

49. Hipp, J. “What is the neighbourhood" in neighbourhood satisfaction? Comparing the effects of structural characteristics measured at the micro-neighbourhood and tract levels. Urban Studies. (2010).47(12): 2517-536. doi: 10.1177/0042098009359950
50. Sharma, M. A Geographic Perspective on Intra-Urban Racial/Ethnic Diversity, Segregation, and Clustering in Knoxville, Tennessee: 1990-2000. Applied Geography. (2011).32: 310-323. doi: 10.1016/j.apgeog.2011.05.002
51. Sharma, M. Diversity in Knoxville: An Applied Perspective. Applied Geography. (2013): 42:140-154. doi: 10.1016/j.apgeog.2013.05.002
52. Jung, P. H.; Thill, J. C.; & M. Issel. Spatial autocorrelation and data uncertainty in the American Community Survey: A critique. International Journal of Geographical Information Science. (2019) 33(6), 1155–1175. https://doi. org/10.1080/13658 816.2018.1554811
53. Spielman, S. E.; Folch, D.; & N. Nagle.. Patterns and causes of uncertainty in the American Community Survey. Applied Geography. (2014) 46, 147–157. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2013.11.002
54. Bearak, J.M.; Burke, K.L.; & Jones, R.K. Disparities and change over time in distance women would need to travel to have an abortion in the USA: a spatial analysis. Lancet Public Health. (2017): 2(11): e493–e500. doi:10.1016/S2468-2667(17)30158-5.
55. Ho, A.T.; Cho, W. Government communication effectiveness and satisfaction with police performance: A large‐scale survey study. Public Administration Review. (2017) 77(2), 228-239
56. HTTP5: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ [last accessed 8.4.2021]

The paragraphs that are MOST relevant to my response here are pasted below for a quick reading by this reviewer:

“3. Research Design (Revised/added paragraphs)

This analysis focuses on the 3,142 counties of USA, excluding Puerto Rico but including Alaska and Hawaii Islands. Counties are used as the scale of analysis to gain local as well as regional/sub-regional spatial perspectives on the gendered dimensions of occupational inequalities, and how might they reflect varying levels of human capital accumulation. I use counties as the scale of analysis for this work because of my focus on the whole country rather than a single metro or a group of metropolises where inter-metro or an intra-metro analysis would have been a preferred scale. Given this paper’s focus on gendered dimensions of occupational and educational inequalities, prior work suggests that women, in general, are affected by similar factors manifested due to structural, institutional, historical, and cultural nuances when they live in geographically similar areas/sub-regions [1,2,36]. By using counties as a scale to assess educational and occupational patterns, I also contextualize and normalize the status of education and occupation across counties as each county is governed by its own distinct sets of rules and policies that affect each county’s men and women almost similarly, until and unless those who are outliers in terms of wealth or political power. Having done significant amount of intra-urban/inter-urban research in geography and social-sciences, I have found that the census-tracts – usually a proxy for neighborhoods – has been used for fine-scale analysis. In some cases, scholars have also adopted more finer scales of geography -– a “micro-neighborhood” – which they define as a cluster of eleven households together – giving them the benefit of a finer than a census-tract analysis [49]. There are other works that have used still finer scales of data – block-group data in computing statistics to examine diversity at the tract-scale, thence proving a very fine scale of intra-urban analyses [50,51]. Thus, while there are potential advantages of using finer scales of data to analyze finer scales of geographies, scholars have also warned us of the disadvantages of using fine-scale data. Given that most data are prepared and made available through estimates, while finer scales of data are very useful in answering pressing questions concerning intra-urban patterns of inequalities/patterns, one should also be aware of the very high levels of errors, uncertainties, and missing values as one goes further down into finer scales of geographies [52,53].

Finally, regarding the use of counties as the scale of analysis in this research, it is well known that a large body of regional science and economic geography research primarily focus on counties, states, countries, and economic subregions/regions or continents as scales of analyses, especially when dealing with regional or sub-regional economic inequalities or the like [1,2,8]. In a recent work on an unrelated topic concerning women, for example, the scholars used data on the availability of abortion-clinics for three years 2000, 2011, and 2014 – to examine the spatial disparities in commute-distance to access the nearest abortion clinics by states and by counties [54]. The scholars chose this large of a geographic entity to adjust for privacy and sensitivity of abortion as an ‘act’ as well as to obtain an idea on the difficulties pertaining to accessing abortion clinics. Hence, the counties and states became their scale of analysis. Likewise, scholars often use larger geographies to conduct analysis on sensitive issues, such as crime, drugs, prostitution, HIV/AIDSs, and the like, to mask and protect the confidentiality of target population due to high risks involved [55]. When research on the pandemic of Covid-19 started, almost every quantitative research presenting and mapping the infection rates analyzed at the scale of countries, states or counties (when considering infections in USA, see the cited source link), rather than cities, tracts, or blocks -- largely to protect the confidentiality of the population, given the sensitivity of Covid-19 and potential victimization of infected population [56]. Because of many such issues discussed here, and the fact that county-scale analyses were quite capable of providing me with an overview of regional and sub-regional perspectives on occupation and education, I chose counties as these captured the local-specific nuanced differences better than states, while also masking the tract-scale sensitivity.”

Comment: Another concern is the fit of this article with the journal Sustainability. sustainable economic development was mentioned a couple of times, but overall I don't find any convincing argument about how gender economic parity is related to sustainable economic development--it is intuitive to link this relationship but still, I would like to see better justification about the link between gender disparity and sustainability. 

Response: Sustainability implies not only environmental or infrastructural. Economic development and gender parity is a VERY HUGE part of economically sustainable society. I have added many sentences throughout the revised version. I hope you will be satisfied with the revised contents now. I have also brought in United Nations 17 goals of sustainable economic development ad why/how can those be achieved by ensuring gender economic equality. I hope you can feel these arguments in the revised version of this paper. Specifically, I have added these 3 most relevant literatures for this part of added clarity:

1. UNDP Envision 2030 Goal 5: Gender Equality | United Nations Enable. Available online: https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal5.html (accessed on 31 July 2020).
2. Kabeer, N. Women’s Empowerment and Economic Development: A Feminist Critique of Storytelling Practices in “Randomista” Economics. Econ. 2020, 26, 1–26.
3. Bayeh, E. The role of empowering women and achieving gender equality to the sustainable development of Ethiopia. Sci. Rev. B Humanit. Soc. Sci. 2016, 2, 37–42.

Finally, I have uploaded the FINAL REVISED version on the website for the Editors. For your quick review, please find the pdf version of the manuscript with the mark-ups showing in red. I hope you will now approve of my finally revised and crisp paper. Thanks a lot for your positive criticism -- Sincerely, Author 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The literature in this domenin is very generous, it is necessary to complete Section 2 - Brief Overview of Gendered Economic Inequalities - with the opinions formulated in others (more current) researches.

Author Response

Response: Thanks a lot for your positive comments. I have added new literature in response to other reviewer’s comments as well as your’s. In all, my references have increased from original 47 to 57 now (10 new papers have been referenced in my revised version). I sincerely hope you will be satisfied with the revised manuscript. I am also uploaded the pdf of the revisions with all mark-ups shown, hopefully that will help.

In response to your suggestions, I specifically note that when comprehensively writing the section 2 – literature review in several sub-sections, the oldest articles were from the early-to-mid 1990s (Sassen, Rocheleau et al, Becker, and the like) -– most of which pertained to theoretical and conceptual frameworks on gender, which were very important for me to cite in this specific work. In the empirical and contemporary aspects of the literature reviewed, most of the papers cited here have been published within last 10 years to 15 years. I was able to do this as I have been teaching a graduate seminar class on gender economic disparity since last two years. I counted that in my cited work, 33 papers/sources out of 57 cited were published during 2014-2021; 10 were published during 2005-2013: and 14 were published during 1989-1993-2004. So, I feel that I did my best in citing the most recent work concerning the issues discussed here.

I will be pleased to cite more recent work if you had directed me toward specific newest work, as that would help me immensely. In my knowledge, I cited what I thought was newest and most relevant to this work. This is why I wanted to conduct this empirical analysis as I didn’t find much on empirical data-based analyses work on gender economic disparity, even though the topic of gender is being pursued at length by those interested in gender and sexuality, gender/LGBTQ rights, and the like – which are very different from what I wanted to study in this work.

For your quick review, I am uploading the REVISED version of my paper with RED MARK-UPs in pdf version. Hopefully this will clearly show you all needed work that I had to. In all, I have added ten new papers to improve the quality of the arguments significantly. I hope you like it. 

Thank you so much for your positive criticism. Your comments helped me a lot in polishing up this paper further.

Thanks – Author

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

the issues raised in my review were well addressed by the author. I recommend the publication of this work.