The Intersectionality of Gender Differences in Travel Behaviors: a Daily Schedule Perspective

Keywords: Travel Behavior, Gender Equity, Intersectionality, Activity-based Approach, Daily Schedule
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Gender differences in travel patterns have been extensively studied in the transportation realm. Recent studies have started to adopt an intersectional lens to examine gender and travel, acknowledging that the convergence of gender and other social identities creates a person’s unique travel experiences. However, studies often focus on gender disparities in trip characteristics and fail to capture the interrelationships of activities and trips throughout the day. To address intersectionality, existing studies often divide people into groups and compare the travel behaviors of these groups. Thus, study findings are restricted by these predefined intersectional groups. Therefore, this study applies the sequence alignment method (SAM) to extract behavior patterns accounting for both trips and activities in daily schedules. Then, this study uses the CHAID (Chi-square automatic interaction detection) method to account for all person-level characters and their combined impacts on people’s travel behavior patterns. Last, this study examines the intersectionality nature of gendered travel patterns using statistical tests. The study used travel survey data collected in Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan areas as a study case to demonstrate the methods and results. The analysis reveals gender differences in travel patterns, such as women losing their after-work personal time after having kids. The CHAID analysis identifies key person-level characteristics that significantly shape travel behavior patterns such as employment status on weekday patterns and age on weekend patterns. These findings suggested that our proposed methods can address the intersectionality nature of social identities and provide novel insights into gender differences in transportation needs.