Is There a Quiet Revolution in Women's Travel? Revisiting the Gender Gap in Commuting

Abstract

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 has been consistently and persistently shorter for women than men. That said, new reports suggest that the gender gap in commuting time and distance may have quietly vanished in some areas. To explore this possibility, I use panel data from the American Housing Survey to better measure and explain commute trends for the entire U.S. from 1985 through 2005. They overwhelmingly indicate that differences stubbornly endure, with men's and women's commuting distances converging only slowly and commuting times diverging. My results also show that commuting times are converging for all races, especially for women; women's job access remains poorer than men's, and women's trips to work by transit are dwindling rapidly. Thus sex continues to play an important role explaining travel, housing, and labor market dynamics, with major implications for planning practice.

Elderly co-residence and the household responsibilities hypothesis: evidence from Nanjing, China

“…There is a notable difference in our sample in terms of travel behavior in Western cities: single females commute longer distances than single males (Crane, 2007). This result is in line with research in Tokyo (Kawase, 2004).…”

“…Hanson and Johnston (1985) find that women in Baltimore in households with children do not have shorter commuting distances than women in households without children. Crane (2007) comes to the same conclusion on the basis of a different data set, the American Housing Survey: the presence of children in the United States of America has no effect on women's commuting distances.…”

“…On the basis of data sets from different geographic areas, studies conclude that women make more daily trips but travel fewer miles. Women tend to commute over shorter distances while making more household support trips (Crane, 2007;Rosenbloom, 2006). There are different explanations for these gender differences.…”

“…Drawing on panel data from the American Housing Survey, Crane (2007) revealed that high residential densities exert a smaller influence on males' than on females' commuting distances. With regard to maintenance purposes, the reverse is found: males' participation in out-of-home household maintenance activities is more sensitive to changes in population densities and the extent of land-use mixture than is females' participation (Schwanen, Ettema, & Timmermans, 2007).…”

Gender and mobility: new approaches for informing sustainability

“…As well as holding cross-nationally, these gender differences tend to remain when socio-demographic variables like education, income, and marital status are held constant. Two recent US-based studies using national data sets (Sandra Rosenbloom using the 2001 National Household Travel Survey and Randall Crane using the 2005 American Housing Survey) confirm that in the US context, this generalization of women's lower mobility levels remains despite altered gender relations within homes and workplaces (Rosenbloom 2006;Crane 2007).…”