Tagung Transforming Cities

Inés Sánchez de Madariaga: Gender and transportation. Key topics for research and policy

This talk will address key gender dimensions of transportation research and policy. It will bring particular focus on the innovative concept “mobility of care” developed by Professor Sanchez De Madariaga. Because trips disproportionately made by women are not properly counted or made visible, they are not adequately integrated into transportation planning and policy. This in turn has consequences for equality of access to transportation systems by women and men, negatively impacting the lives of women and their possibilities to access job markets and urban services more generally.

The „mobility of care“ is an umbrella category that includes all the trips made by adults to attend to the tasks of caring for dependent people and the upkeep of the home. Statistically, these trips are made mostly by women. The concept of “mobility of care” recognizes the need to assess and identify the daily trips related to care activities. Mobility of care includes all trips made to carry out daily tasks, and includes, without limitation, the following purposes for travel: accompanying minors to school, extracurricular activities, medical appointments, playing sports, or any other activity, daily or on a more extemporaneous basis; shopping; run errands, both in public and private offices; visit and accompany sick people and elderly people, etc. These activities, normally unpaid, involve traveling to specific places in the city, at specific times of the day, using the available transport systems, under certain price, ergonomic and safety conditions. It is important to note that for a large majority of people today they must be combined and made compatible, in time and space, with paid employment.

Surveys conducted by public agencies in charge of transport policy do not normally allow an adequate measurement of care-related trips. Transportation surveys often have gender biases and omissions in the way data is collected, interpreted, analyzed, and represented. Many surveys, for example, do not take into account short walks of less than 1 km or 15 minutes; linked trips are not taken into consideration, and trips related to care are hidden under other categories such as „visit“, „walk“, „free time“, „accompany“ or „other“. The concept of „mobility of care“ provides the practical and operational foundations necessary to create a new approach to data collection and treatment and, therefore, the definition of policies and their implementation, all with the aim of achieving a better integration of gender perspectives in the planning and management of transport, consequently promoting equal opportunities between men and women in the city.

The low participation of women in the labour force is a second important aspect of gendered understandings of transportation. The talk will also address this issue by looking at the following aspects: the situation of women in the transportation sector; the causes and the barriers both from the point of view of women and of employers; the business case for increasing the number of women employed in transportation; recommendations and examples of good practice to promote women’s employment in transportation.