Is Shorter Better? An Analysis of Gender, Race, and Industrial Segmentation in San Francisco Bay Area Commuting Patterns

Abstract

There is a growing consensus that poor access to employment opportunities is a critical factor in minority inner-city unemployment (Kain 1992; Holzer 1991; Ihlanfeldt & Sjoquist 1989, 1990; Peterson & Vroman 1992) and a major mobility disadvantage for the minority inner-city employed. Conspicuous by their absence from this spatial debate are the issues of female access to employment opportunities and sex-based differences in commuting patterns. Although women often have higher unemployment rates than men (England & Farkas 1986), female employment is not considered part of the mismatch problem, as women are not spatially concentrated in the way that many minority groups are. In fact, women's labor force participation is increasing, in part because the restructuring of the economy has increased the number of low-paid, dead-end secondary service sector jobs, the type of jobs which women historically have held. Furthermore, since journey-to-work travel times for women are lower than travel times for men, the accessibility of employment for women is not generally considered problematic. In this paper, the authors examine the possibility that the shorter travel times for women indicate not the absence of an employment problem, but the presence of individual choices and/or structural constraints. Specifically, using data from the San Francisco Bay Area, the authors evaluate the two dominant theories used to explain sex-based differences in commuting time: the theory that women minimize travel times due to preference and/or responsibilities in the household, and the theory that the types of industries in which women are concentrated locate in a dispersed pattern which facilitates access. After establishing the theoretical context of labor markets and reviewing the literature specific to women and travel time to work, they attempt to explain the differences in journey-to-work travel time across the dimensions of race/ethnicity, residential density, household responsibility, employment in male- and female-dominated industries, and the combination of residential and industrial locations. Although travel time patterns vary considerably among the population subgroups under study, they find that sex-based differences remain within the different dimensions analyzed. The analysis suggests that neither the economic rationality argument nor the industrial location approach provides an adequate explanation of why women spend less time commuting.

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