The best US cities for women working in real estate might not be where you'd think.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which uses data from the census, says jobs in the real-estate industry include residential and commercial brokers, property managers, landscapers, groundskeepers, and people in administrative roles such as office clerks and operations managers.
An analysis of US census data by MyEListing, a commercial-real-estate-technology company and marketplace, found that in 2021, nearly half of the real-estate industry's 3 million workers nationwide were women, but they earned only about 89% of the salaries of their male counterparts.
But the analysis also found several places where women outperformed men in number of employees and in pay. In several metropolitan areas, women made up a bigger share of the real-estate workforce and made more money than their male counterparts.
They're not big cities like New York and Los Angeles or popular spots like Miami and Austin, Texas, but 10 smaller hubs with vibrant economies such as Tucson, Arizona, and Poughkeepsie, New York.
Some aren't too far from urban centers — Poughkeepsie is just under 100 miles north of New York City, while Stockton, California, is about 80 miles east of San Francisco. Others are popular spots in the Midwest, such as Des Moines, the capital of Iowa.
The analysis suggests that in most of these metro areas in 2021, women made up a larger share of the real-estate workforce than men and made more than men did on average.