Gender, Race, and Travel Behavior: An Analysis of Household-Serving Travel and Commuting in the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract

This paper examines how the division of household responsibilities shapes the travel behavior of men and women. In particular, the authors focus on the influence of socioeconomic factors-gender, race/ethnicity, income, and household structure-in shaping household-serving travel patterns. Using travel data from the San Francisco Bay Area they find that women are, on average, disproportionately responsible for child-serving and household maintenance travel, and that white, Hispanic, and low income women tend to be, on average, especially burdened with household maintenance responsibilities. They find further that the women's household-serving travel patterns appear to be a function of both socialization and the sexual division of household responsibilities. They see evidence of socialization in the distinctly gendered grocery shopping patterns observed in single adult households with no children. And they find evidence of the sexual division of household labor in the increasing burden of household-serving travel at each stage in the life cycle and robustness of the gender variable in multivariate models of child-serving travel during the journey-to-work.

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