Sunday, December 09, 2012 - 12:01 AM
By Alex Goldmark
Women (click here) are more likely to ride public transportation to work than men. Men are more likely to drive to work.
The latest data from the American Community Survey of the U.S. Census show: Of the people who take public transportation to work, 50.5 percent are women and 49.5 percent are male. That might not seem like a difference worth mentioning until you consider the workforce overall.
The American adult workforce is mostly male, and by a decent amount: 53 percent male to 47 percent female.
One theory is that type of occupation is correlated with gender, and women are more likely to be in mid-level jobs (so earning less, and looking to spend less on commuting) in offices, which tend to be more likely to be in city centers serviced by transit.
Interestingly, men are slightly more likely to carpool than women in the U.S. and women are slightly more likely drive to work alone relative to the general population of workers.
For solo drivers nationally it's 52.6 percent male (slightly less than their 53 percent share of the workforce).
For carpoolers it's 54.7 percent (a touch more than their 53 percent of the workforce.) Meaning it's men who tend to carpool more than women among those who drive. But just by a hair.
It's transit where the gender gap spikes.
The gap is especially wide in cities where transit is more readily available than it is nationally....
The investments we make in public transportation support women and their households far more often than they do men. When considering impacts on public transportation there has to be particular focus on women.
Eric Jaffe
February 1, 2012
If we bothered to anthropomophize (click here) the problems of pubic transit, we'd probably consider them equal opportunity haters. Cars Crowd, fare rise, service dwindles for one and all.
But it turns out our public transportation services might harbor a bit of a gender bias against women. That's the argument put forth by Gendered Innovations, a Stanford University project devoted to gender analysis, in a new line of study called "Transportation: Reconceptualizing Data Collection."
By reexamining transportation data, the researchers at Gendered Innovations believe they've uncovered evidence that women ride transit systems much more often than typical numbers suggest. The researchers contend that regular transit surveys obscure the number of trips caregivers (particularly parents or, more likely, mothers) take; that serial trips, which women make more often than men, aren't sufficiently defined; and that aggregated ridership figures, particularly by race, create incomplete pictures of the riding public.
These true numbers, the researchers conclude, should encourage metro transit systems to redesign facilities to accommodate the transport needs of women....
