Abstract
Mobile phone data have been extensively used to study urban mobility. However, studies based on gender-disaggregated large-scale data are still lacking, limiting our understanding of gendered aspects of urban mobility and our ability to design policies for gender equality. Here we study urban mobility from a gendered perspective, combining commercial and open datasets for the city of Santiago, Chile. We analyze call detail records for a large cohort of anonymized mobile phone users and reveal a gender gap in mobility: women visit fewer unique locations than men, and distribute their time less equally among such locations. Mapping this mobility gap over administrative divisions, we observe that a wider gap is associated with lower income and lack of public and private transportation options. Our results uncover a complex interplay between gendered mobility patterns, socio-economic factors and urban affordances, calling for further research and providing insights for policymakers and urban planners.
Highlights
Cities, and how they are designed, are not gender-neutral
We mapped indicators of mobility differences between males and females to 51 comunas (Spanish for municipalities) of the Santiago Metropolitan Region and we investigated the association between mobility inequalities and socio-demographic indicators in different areas of the city, as well as their relationship with the Santiago transportation network structure
Call Detail Records (CDRs) come with limitations due to their sparsity, previous studies have shown that CDRs can be used to infer origin–destination trips by purpose and time of day (Alexander et al, 2015) and to model travel demand on road networks (Çolak et al, 2016)
Summary
How they are designed, are not gender-neutral. Consider daily mobility: moving around provides for different experiences depending on whether you are a woman or a man. Women and girls engage more in multi-purpose, multi-stop trips (‘trip chaining’) in order to do household chores, as well as other gender differentiated roles (Brown et al, 2014). Several empirical studies conducted in both developed and developing countries have found that women tend to travel shorter distances, to chain trips, to spend more time traveling and to prefer public transport and taxi services to cars more than men (Ng and Acker, 2018). The large majority of studies on women and transport have solely relied on the analysis of survey data, using multinomial logistic regressions to estimate the effect of gender on mobility variables. In the past decade, mobile phone data have been demonstrated to provide valuable, timely, fine-grained information on human mobility, from citywide to nationwide spatial scales (Blondel et al, 2015). To what extent gender inequalities in urban mobility can be investigated using mobile phone data, remains an open research question
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