Gender earnings equity in local labor markets and hospitality establishment survival

The hospitality sector employs a large share of women, yet gender earnings disparities remain widespread. Although prior research has documented these disparities, little is known about whether gender earnings equity in local labor markets is associated with the survival of hospitality establishments. Drawing on labor-market pooling theory, we examine whether higher female-to-male earnings ratios (FMR) are associated with lower establishment exit risk and whether this relationship becomes stronger when local hospitality labor availability is lower. Using longitudinal data on California hospitality establishments from 2011 to 2020—394,386 establishment-year observations across 91,870 establishments—we estimate time-varying Cox proportional hazards models and complementary log-normal accelerated failure-time models. We further assess robustness using two control-function approaches, lagged and alternative FMR measures, spatially smoothed local-market measures, and sensitivity to alternative covariate sets. A higher local FMR is consistently associated with lower exit hazards and longer predicted survival durations. Moreover, this association is stronger in markets with lower hospitality labor availability, a pattern consistent with the proposed labor-market pooling mechanism. These findings reposition gender earnings equity as a local labor-market condition associated with establishment viability and extend hospitality workforce research beyond employee- and organization-level outcomes to establishment survival. To support practical application, we provide an interactive dashboard that visualizes FMR and related local labor-market conditions at the ZIP-code level across the United States.