Chapter 22: Women and Travel

Transportation planning and engineering have not historically been gender neutral. It has traditionally been assumed that travelers are relatively homogeneous in their travel needs, values, preferences, and behavior. The typical traveler has been characterized as a commuter, who seeks to minimize travel time to work and who values time as forgone leisure time. Highway and transit facilities have often been designed to achieve some desirable level of mobility for this “representative” traveler. These assumptions are becoming increasingly unrealistic and outdated, however, as women become increasingly motorized.

At an aggregate level, women’s travel patterns appear to be converging to those of men, at least in terms of per capita distance traveled. An increase in female labor force participation is largely responsible for this trend. In the U.S.A., for example, the number of women in the workforce has increased by 122% since 1969, which is in sharp contrast to men, whose numbers in the workforce increased by only 47% during the same time (Hu and Young, 1999). Women’s role as primary caretakers of household and family obligations, their concerns for personal safety, and, more generally, the geographical dispersion of population are also contributing to a growing motorization of women. At micro level, the travel patterns and needs of women tend to differ from those of men. Gender differences exist in the reason for travel, trip lengths and frequencies, mode choice, and the complexity of trip making.