1st February 2000 – 31st December 2000
British Academy
Dr Bailey attended the 96th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers to act as panellist in a session dedicated to the “Geographies of Women’s Health” and to present a paper titled The Quilt of Migration: Balancing Career and Home.
The aim of this paper was to expand the knowledge of dual-career couples by (a) examining negotiations made before, during and after a family migration decision (b) analysing the interconnected ways that migration and place shape the career trajectories of married women.
Neo-classical accounts of employment and career development assume that married couples move to areas that economically benefit the primary wage earner (who has traditionally been male). Dr Baileys past collaborative work has demonstrated , in a general statistical way, that this is mot always true, and that (a) the presence of children affects women’s careers (b) women may do better (or less well) in some destinations than in others. This paper reports the first results of ethnographic research carried out among 14 dual career couples in the summer of 1999 in Boston, Massachusetts.
Results showed that (a) Married men and women give very different reasons for moving (b) In one third of the interviews partners contradicted each other on why they thought the family moved (c) Non economic reasons, typically to be close to other family members, or wanting to return to a childhood area, were mentioned by a significant minority of couples as more important than economic reasons for choosing where they live (d) partners typically did not make a link in their own minds between geographic mobility and subsequent career development.