Introduction

In this chapter, we argue that the difficulty some women face in accessing employment opportunities has been poorly understood by those designing and implementing employment policies. We examine why this is a problem and explore the position of women who are on the margins of the labour market. For this group of women, and for those women who are, in effect, excluded from the labour market, access to local employment is crucial. If labour market analysis and policy are to be effective, we need to understand why routes into the labour market work so inadequately for many women, and why, even in areas of employment growth, many women living in poor neighbourhoods remain either disconnected from sustainable employment opportunities or concentrated in poor-quality jobs.

Women's patterns of work, their relationship to the labour market over the life course, and gendered occupational segregation in many workplaces are known to lead to a concentration of women in low-valued jobs, but the reason why some women remain on the margins of the labour market is less well understood. Chapters Two and Three showed that the existing literature on gender and the labour market provides an incomplete understanding of the experience of women who are disengaged from the labour market. Reshaped tax, benefit and employment interventions designed to transfer people from welfare into work have focused on factors related to individual and family situations that are thought to impede them in accessing employment. Child welfare and the barriers faced by lone parents have been central themes of New Labour's welfare policy (Finch, n.d.), but there has been much less emphasis on the availability of jobs and on employment opportunities that can fit their other responsibilities.

The local dimension explored in this chapter is especially important for women, as it is well established that women living in poorer areas include disproportionate numbers of lone parents, older women and those on low wages, most of whom lead tightly circumscribed and highly localised lives (Hanson and Pratt, 1995; Yeandle et al, 2003). Women's use of local services is different from that of men, and the ‘lived experience’ of local labour markets plays a crucial role in shaping communities (Raco, 2007).