Gender and Urban Activity Patterns in Uppsala, Sweden

G EOGRAPHERS, sociologists, planners, and other persons concerned with the quality of urban life have studied daily travel behavior and activity patterns of urban residents for more than a decade. The different ways in which persons use an urban environment have been studied as an indication of the level of the richness enjoyed, or deprivation endured, by members of various social groups.1 Contemporary urban space with activities allocated to different, discrete locations puts a premium on mobility. An approach toward understanding travel behavior is to identify a factor believed to be important in shaping observed spatial behavior and then to use this factor as the basis for comparison of group-travel patterns. Geographers have examined various aspects of group-travel behavior.2 Relatively little, however, has been done to assess the impact of social roles on travel behavior observed in an urban setting. The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which gender-related roles affect daily travel-activity patterns of individuals. Here we compare the travel-activity patterns of men and women who are employed full-time. We focus on employed persons for a number of reasons. First, comparable employment status is necessary because work outside the home is a major constraint on the way in which individuals allocate time to various activities at different locations. Second, the number of women in the labor force has increased. The behavior patterns of employed women should be examined because the working woman is becoming more typical than the nonworking woman.3 Third, in the context of the current debate over whether or not traditional sex roles are eroded when women gain economic independence through employment, the influence of traditional sex roles on spatial behavior when both men and women share the same constraints from full-time employment outside the home needs to be analyzed.4