Gender gaps in urban mobility

Abstract

The use of public transportation or simply moving about in streets are gendered issues. Women and girls often engage in multi-purpose, multi-stop trips in order to do household chores, work, and study ('trip chaining'). Womenheaded households are often more prominent in urban settings and they tend to work more in low-paid/informal jobs than men, with limited access to transportation subsidies. Here we present recent results on urban mobility from a gendered perspective by uniquely combining a wide range of datasets, including commercial sources of telecom and open data. We explored urban mobility of women and men in the greater metropolitan area of Santiago, Chile, by analyzing the mobility traces extracted from the Call Detail Records (CDRs) of a large cohort of anonymized mobile phone users over a period of 3 months. We find that, taking into account the differences in users' calling behaviors, women move less than men, visiting less unique locations and distributing their time less equally among such locations. By mapping gender differences in mobility over the 52 comunas of Santiago, we find a higher mobility gap to be correlated with socio-economic indicators, such as a lower average income, and with the lack of public and private transportation options. Such results provide new insights for policymakers to design more gender inclusive transportation plans in the city of Santiago.

Measuring Spatial Subdivisions in Urban Mobility with Mobile Phone Data

“…In terms of scope, our work is similar to recent efforts to uncover gender gaps in urban mobility [11]. The differences in our approach are two-fold.…”

“…Ref. [11] found relationships between accessibility gaps with the diversity of places, and between economic development and the diversity of social connections in places [10]. To explore this potential relationship, for each cell i we estimate its POI entropy, defined as the Shannon Information Entropy H :…”

“…Mobile phone data, for example, allows a cost-effective way to perform studies about urban human mobility [7], as mobile operators already generate, store, and analyze the data for billing and marketing purposes. The aggregation of digital traces from mobile phone usage was used to uncover data gaps in mobility [11], a true seminal piece of work towards using this data source for inclusive cities. Inspired by this line of work, we extend the scope to understand mobility aspects of three groups of urban visitors: women, elders, and tourists.…”

Gender Patterns of Human Mobility in Colombia: Reexamining Ravenstein’s Laws of Migration

“…Amidst the plethora of attributes available, gender is a key one because men and women can emerge alternative behaviours [11]. Recently, the gap existing between men and women has become the focus of many studies (e.g., on urban mobility and academic performance) [5,6,13,16]. Despite the efforts made to improve gender equality [4], both gender's routines remain being affected differently [6].…”

“…Recently, the gap existing between men and women has become the focus of many studies (e.g., on urban mobility and academic performance) [5,6,13,16]. Despite the efforts made to improve gender equality [4], both gender's routines remain being affected differently [6]. Understanding such differences is crucial to build a better "environment" for everyone [5,8,18], and design interventions on transportation aimed at reducing gender gaps to offer the same mobility opportunities [12,16].…”