Networks, gender and race in job-seeking in rural America (Missouri)

How do the networks of black and white, male and female job-seekers differ? And: Does that makes some of them more successful than others in finding a job? Jenine Harrison and her co-authors have interviewed job seekers in rural Missouri and drawn Net-Maps that indicate clearly which contacts are male/female, black/white to understand these questions better.

The abstract of their paper: Higher rates of unemployment are found among African-American men in rural communities in the US. As part of a community-based participatory research project, we sought to identify characteristics of job-seeking networks of African-American and white employed and unemployed men and women in a rural community in Missouri. We collected ross-sectional quantitative and qualitative information about job-seeking networks through in-depth interviews with 9 local residents. Descriptive network measures were used to compare the gender, race, and employment status of the people comprising participant job-seeking networks. A novel network approach was used to simulate a whole network from individual networks depicting likely patterns of job-seeking relationships across the community. Unemployed participants had larger networks, with the exception of white women. Men had more racially homogenous networks than women; many networks had no racial diversity. Men had longer relationships than women, while women had stronger relationships. Employed participants had more linkages to alters with connections to community organizations
than unemployed participants. Unemployed participants had many connections, but lacked connections to the right people and organizations to aid in their job search. Increasing employment opportunities in this community, and similar communities, will require effort from job-seekers and others to develop new relationships, programs, and policies.