Is There A Gender Gap In Commuting?

"Today's lesson comes from a casual reading of a listserv exchange, when I had plenty else to do. Just last month on the planning educators' listserv, PLANET, Portland State's Jennifer Dill noted that their admitted masters class was disproportionately female in recent years, and asked if this pattern was evident elsewhere."

From the abstract of "Is There a Quiet Revolution in Women's Travel? Revisiting the Gender Gap in Commuting" (revised March, 2007):

"Gender is both an archetypal and adaptive dimension of the urban condition and thus remains a key moving target for planning practitioners and scholars alike. This is especially true of women's growing, if not revolutionary, involvement in the economy. A familiar exception is the trip linking work and home – the commute – which is consistently and persistently shorter for

women than men. That said, recent data hint that the gender gap in travel, much like those in education and careers, may have all but vanished. Besides the implications for transportation planning, this might suggest that women are not only comparably prepared for employment, they are finally willing and able to successfully compete for jobs near and far.

To address this question more clearly, I use improved data and methods to better measure and explain commute trends for the entire U.S. from 1985 through 2005. They overwhelmingly indicate that the gender gap stubbornly endures, with distances converging only slowly and times further diverging.

Should planners care? In addition to the light shed on the spatial pattern of employment by sex, these results bear on a gamut of applied planning issues that link where people live to where they work: Sprawl (increasing at a slower rate than expected), spatial mismatch (commute times by race are converging, especially for women), welfare reform (women remain at a spatial

disadvantage in job access), and transit policy (female transit use is shrinking rapidly). Planners should be alert to the evidence that sex continues to play a distinguishing role in travel, housing and labor market dynamics."

Thanks to Randall Crane