Gender Roles, Accessibility, and Gendered Spatiality

Abstract

This study attempts to elucidate manifold dimensions of gendered accessibility experiences. How gender roles (household responsibilities) differentiate accessibility experiences between women and men is explored through the comparison of married dual-earner couples’ parental status, using the US Portland activity-travel diary dataset with GIS-based geocomputation results of (time-geography based) space-time accessibility. First, this study shows how gender division of labor within the household still permeates current society, despite the widespread belief of the social change toward a gender-egalitarian society. Then, the study pays special attention to the way gender roles structure individual accessibility experiences of women and men differently, and, in turn, the way such accessibility experiences take a form of gendered spatiality. Gendered spatiality is examined through the analysis of accessibility space as well as activity space in order to ascertain women’s home-attached and spatially entrapped characteristics. More household responsibilities throughout a day and, even more, the time constraint of picking up children at the daycare centers after work lead women’s possible activity space to be more home-centered. The analysis of the spatio-temporal context of accessibility space makes gendered spatiality visible. However, the findings suggest that behavioral outcomes should be understood with an explicit awareness of constraints individuals face. It is because the revealed activity spaces can be not only an outcome of constraint but also an outcome of choice. Behavioral outcomes should not be treated as a straightforward expression of the level of constraints. It is problematic to expect that behavioral outcomes directly mirror the level of constraints. It is also problematic to suppose that the level of constraints can be straightforwardly elicited from revealed behavioral outcomes.

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