Conditions and Performance Chapter Listing

Conditions and Performance Home Page

Introduction

Summary

The Role of Income

Role of Age

Role of Gender

Role of Race and Hispanic Status

Role of Gender

Women's roles have and are continuing to change in all aspects of their lives—at home, at work, and in society at large. Changing gender roles represent the most significant influence on changes in travel behavior over the past quarter century.

Both men's and women's lives are becoming more complex as we try to balance work and family responsibilities. Women have made great strides and accomplishments in the last 20 years, but remain primarily responsible for family and shopping trips. These responsibilities stem from our attitudes toward how family needs are met. As Martin Wachs stated "travel patterns are among the most clearly 'gendered' aspects of American life."

Working mothers make more trips, more often in a car, and cover more miles than at any time in the past 25 years. Dual career households buy services, such as day care, that were formerly conducted in the home. Mothers still serve as the primary "taxi" service for their children, and as they increase the number of hours worked, women link more and more stops on to the trip to and from work. This phenomenon is called "trip chaining." It is important to consider the impact of this complex travel pattern because trip chaining may increase congestion at the peak periods, and people who must link trips together have a limited ability to shift commute trips to transit or car pools.

Whereas travel by single adults of both sexes, and by men and women in households without children is rather similar, travel by men and women in households with smaller children is starkly different. Women have always made trips for sustaining the household such as shopping trips and family errands—the increase in women's participation in the labor force has pushed these trips into the non-work time periods. In addition, many employed women with children drop children at school or day-care on the way to work. Therefore, non-work related trips are being chained together between home and work. This trip-chaining behavior is especially prevalent by women in households with children under 5 years of age.

When we look at the 1995 NPTS, working adult women traveling on weekdays are more likely than men to make stops on the way to or from work, as shown in Exhibit 1-7. The majority of women (61.2 percent) make at least one stop after work, and almost thirty percent (28.3 percent) make two stops or more. Just under half (46.4 percent) of men stop on the way home from work, and only about one out of six (17.7 percent) make two stops or more. The job of running errands to support a home is exacerbated for low-income single mothers who are least likely to own or have access to an automobile.

Exhibit 1-7

Percent of Working Men and Women Who Trip Chain on the Way to or from Work

The effect of women's employment on their travel is clear. Between 1983 and 1995, the population of women 16 and older grew by 12 percent, the incidence of women in the workforce grew by 36 percent, and the average woman increased her daily person miles of travel by 49 percent. Perhaps in future years, with more women completing college, and entering more varied occupations, differences in jobs and salaries between men and women will translate into child care patterns and family responsibilities which are more evenly divided and the gap between men's and women's travel will close somewhat.