Transportation: Reconceptualizing Data Collection

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The Challenge
Gendered Innovation 1: Visualizing the Mobility of Care
Method: Rethinking Language and Visual Representations
Gendered Innovation 2: Conceptualizing and Studying Trip Chaining
Method: Rethinking Concepts and Theories
Gendered Innovation 3: Gathering Sex-Disaggregated Data Improves Transport Policy and Research
Method: Analyzing Factors Intersecting with Sex and Gender
Conclusions
Next Steps
 

The Challenge

Researchers examining public transportation use often categorize trips according to purpose in order to better understand existing transportation patterns and to better plan for infrastructure changes. For example, the U.S. Federal Highway Administration uses the following categories for public transit (U.S. FHA, 2009):

• ●To/From Work
  ●Work Related Business
  ●Shopping
  ●Other Family/Personal Errands
  ●School/Church
  ●Social and Recreational
  ●Other
  

Categories used in transportation surveys—and, hence, the way statistics are gathered and analyzed—may not properly account for caring work—that is, unpaid labor performed by adults for children or other dependants, including labor related to the upkeep of a household.

Gendered Innovation 1: Visualizing the Mobility of Care

Time Use Surveys provide a perspective for evaluating transportation surveys. The Harmonised European Time Use Survey codes time use into forty-nine categories and provides sex-disaggregated data on time usage within fifteen countries. In Spain, women spend more time than men performing the three explicit categories of childcare coded in the Survey:

Data for Spain is similar to data averaged across the EU; in the 15 countries surveyed, women performed an average of 32 minutes childcare per day, and men performed an average of 12 minutes. In all EU countries surveyed, women spent significantly more time performing childcare than men—from 1.7 times more in Sweden to 4.8 times more in Latvia. This pattern holds in the U.S. as well—in 2010, the average U.S. woman spent 32 minutes caring for and helping children in her household, twice as much as the average U.S. man’s 16 minutes (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011). It is important to recognize that men’s caring work has increased over time. For example, British fathers with children under age 5 spent an average of only 13 minutes on childcare in 1961; this increased to 120 minutes by 1999 (O’Brien et al., 2003).

If the definition of “care” is expanded to include other categories of domestic work, women spend substantially more time than men engaged in these forms of work as well:

 

The reality that women spend much more time than men performing caring work implies that consideration of caring work is key to gender equality in transportation; many forms of caring work rely upon public transportation.

Inés Sánchez de Madariaga’s innovative concept, “mobility of care,” provides a perspective for “recognizing and revaluing care work”—to appreciate the trips that women and men make when caring for others (Sánchez de Madariaga, 2009). Adding this concept to transportation surveys facilitates designing these trips into transit systems—see Method.

Method: Rethinking Language and Visual Representations

The following graphs demonstrate how the concept “mobility of care” reveals significant travel patterns otherwise concealed in data collection variables (Sánchez de Madariaga, 2012; Sánchez de Madariaga, 2009). The pie charts represent trips made in Spain in 2007. Chart (A) privileges paid employment by presenting it as a single, large category. Caring work, by contrast, is divided into numerous small categories and hidden under other headings, such as escorting, shopping, leisure, etc.

Chart (B) introduces the variable “caring work” under the ad hoc assumption that certain proportions of trips described as "escorting," "shopping," etc. were made for the purpose of providing care. Visualizing care trips in one dedicated category emphasizes the importance of caring work (Sánchez de Madariaga, 2011).

A number of innovations in transportation design have been implemented to support the mobility of caring. In London, for example, these include:

● Step-free access to trains, subways, and busses. Transportation authorities are removing steps from streets to platforms to accommodate baby carriages, luggage, wheelchairs, and similar devices. In 2007, the London Underground had developed 47 step-free stations.
● Wide aisle gate access to transportation.
● Level access from platforms to trains (Transport for London, 2007).

View General Method

Gendered Innovation 2: Conceptualizing and Studying Trip Chaining

A simplistic definition of a “trip” describes each trip as a journey from a single start location to a single destination, typically utilizing a single form of transportation. The concepts of “trip chaining” and “multipurpose trips” expand upon this definition by recognizing that trips are often involve a sequence of destinations and are multimodal (McGuckin et al., 2005b; Hanson, 1980). Research on trip chaining has examined the directions of trips, timing of travel, and purpose of the stops with attention to sex and other covariates—see Method.

Method: Rethinking Concepts and Theories

Analyzing gender in transportation requires challenging underlying concepts and identifying gaps in the way data are collected. It also requires introducing new concepts and theories that model the complex routes taken by real people. A study of travel in the United States between 1995 and 2001 using the concept of trip chaining has produced the following insights regarding women’s and men’s travel patterns:

● A greater number of women than men make multiple-stop trips when traveling between their homes and workplaces. However, this observed sex difference is decreasing, mainly due to an increase in trip chaining among men (between 1995 and 2001, the number of stops men made while returning home from work increased by 24%).
● Women make more short stops on the way to or from work than do men to perform household-sustaining activities, such as shopping and family errands, and working women in two-worker families were twice as likely as men in two-worker families to pick up and drop off school-age children at school during their commute.
● Other demographic variables interact with sex in predicting trip chaining. For example, having a child under the age of 5 in a household increases trip chaining among both women and men—see chart (McGukin et al., 2005a).

View General Method

Research on trip chaining—with attention to gendered differences in travel—has been key to urban development in Vienna, for example. When planning extensions to subway lines, civil engineers considered multi-destination trips involving travel to workplaces, crèches, schools, hospitals, and parks (Irschik, 2008).

Gendered Innovation 3: Gathering Sex-Disaggregated Data Improves Transportation Research and Policy

In 2001, officials in the Swedish Transportation Department acknowledged disparities between women and men in transportation sector employment (for example, most people in leadership positions were men, a form of vertical segregation) and proposed integrating gender analysis into Swedish transportation policy and administration practices (Sahlin et al., 2001). To advance the goal of creating “a gender-equal road transport system […] that is designed to fulfill the transport needs of both women and men,” researchers disaggregated transportation data by sex. Researchers found that, among people in paid employment, a greater proportion of women (18%) than men (14%) utilize public transit. Other differences were also observed.

Subsequently, in planning a new commuter route project in Skåne (Sweden’s southernmost province), planners “prioritized routes that can contribute to strengthen and develop local labour market regions for women, as these regions are geographically smaller, ahead of routes that expand the wider geographical labour market regions for men” (Swedish Road Administration, 2009). The Swedish Road Administration has also highlighted the need for a transit system to support gender equality, and its considerations include the reality that women “take more responsibility [than do men] for household work and caring for the young and elderly” (Swedish Road Administration, 2010).

Method: Analyzing Factors Intersecting with Sex and Gender

Disaggregating data by sex is a first step. To serve a wide user base, other variables need to be considered and analyzed for how they interact with sex and gender (Audirac, 2008). These include:

● Age: Designing public transport systems to consider the mobility needs of older adults supports safe mobility for older people who have ceased driving for various health reasons (Currie et al., 2010). Gender also interacts with age in the context of driving cessation: researchers found that “older females were more likely than males to have planned ahead [for cessation], made the decision themselves, and stopped at appropriate times” (Oxley et al., 2011). The correlation between age and geographic location is a major challenge in supporting the mobility of older people: more older people live in rural areas than do younger people (O’Neill, 2010).

● Family status: The presence of children—particularly young children—increases the number of caring trips and the need for routes to accommodate these needs (Crane, 2007).

● Race and ethnicity: In the United States, use of public transportation differs by both sex and self-reported race/ethnicity; however, race and ethnicity more strongly correlate with public transport use than does sex:

● Geographic location: Locations differ in terms of safety. New design features have made transportation safer. These include designated waiting areas [DWAs], transparent bus shelters, emergency intercoms and surveillance mechanisms, and alternative services and routes, such as request-stop programs, allowing users to disembark from the bus at locations closer to their final destination at night (Schulz et al., 1996).

View General Method

Conclusions

Analyzing gender in public transportation requires:

• 1. Rethinking categories used in public transportation surveys. The innovative concept, “mobility of care,” captures significant travel patterns, and can be used to render public transportation more equitable and responsive to users’ needs.
  2. Rethinking basic concepts, such as what constitutes a “trip”—whether to a single destination or a series of “chained” destinations.
  3. Gathering data disaggregated by sex and other variables (such as income, self-reported race/ethnicity, family status, etc.) that may correlate with transit use.
  

Next Steps

The European Commission and other governmental organizations have identified how sex and gender analysis can enhance public transportation through both basic research and policymaking:

Basic Research:

• 1. Analyzing biological sex differences (in women’s and men’s height, weight, etc.) in designing steps and railings, positioning buttons, etc. This includes rethinking standards and reference models as necessary to recognize pregnancy as a normal physiological state (European Commission, 2007).
  2. Collecting sex-disaggregated transportation data and including factors intersecting with sex and gender (such as “socioeconomic and demographic indicators”) in data analysis (European Commission, 2007).

Transport Policy:

• 1. Working to eliminate disparities between women’s and men’s representation on transit planning boards through efforts to increase the number of women experts in the transit Workprogramme (European Commission, 2007).
  2. Conducting regular and systematic “gender audits” to evaluate transport systems from a gender perspective (Hamilton et al., 2000).
  3. Harmonizing transportation and time use statistics within the European Union in order to account for the mobility of care (European Parliament’s Committee on Transport and Tourism, 2006).