Gender Differences in Work-Trip Length: Explanations and Implications

Many studies have shown that women work closer to home than do men, but few have probed the reasons for this persistent finding and none has done so at the metropolitan scale or considered the link between journey-to-work patterns and the occupational segregation of women. We first review the various possible reasons for women's shorter journeys to work and then examine each of these with data from the Baltimore, Maryland SMSA. We compare the work-trip distances and times of 303 employed women with those of 484 men, drawn from the 1977 Baltimore Travel Demand Data. As expected, women's work trips are significantly shorter than men's in both travel time and distance Women's lower incomes, their concentration in female-dominated occupations, and their greater reliance on the bus and auto passenger modes all help to explain their shorter work trips Male-female differences in part— versus full-time work status, occupational group, and, most surprisingly, household responsibility, did not, however, contribute to explaining observed gender differences in joumey-to-work patterns. We also found that the difference in the home and work locations of women and men could explain women's shorter work trips. A higher proportion of women than of men live and work in the central city, where journey to work distances are shorter, and there is some evidence that female-dominated employment opportunities are more uniformly distributed over the SMSA whereas male-dominated jobs are clustered in certain districts. We conclude that working women are more sensitive to distance than men are for reasons related more to their mobility than to their "dual roles" of wage earner/homemaker Also, because of women's sensitivity to commuting distance, the location of different types of employment opportunities is likely to play a role in the occupational segregation of women.