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How many gaps are there? Investigating the regional dimension of the gender commuting gap

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Previous studies have reported that urban spatial structure and the spatial relationship between jobs and housing are strongly correlated with commuting patterns. Nevertheless, a number of studies have also supported the concept that the spatial relationship between workplaces and residences cannot be the only reason behind observed commuting behaviour. Some ‘soft’ factors also affect people's commuting patterns. When considering these ‘soft’ factors, urban land development patterns such as urban structure and the spatial relationship between jobs and housing must not be overlooked. In this paper, we first conduct a brief review of the debate about how urban spatial structure and the jobs–housing relationship affect commuting patterns. Then we mainly focus on the ‘soft’ factors related to commuting behaviour. We divided the ‘soft factors’ into city-level factors and individual- and household-level factors. These perspectives will offer insights to identify a set of key factors that could affect the patterns of commuting.
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Problem: Localities and states are turning to land planning and urban design for help in reducing automobile use and related social and environmental costs. The effects of such strategies on travel demand have not been generalized in recent years from the multitude of available studies.Purpose: We conducted a meta-analysis of the built environment-travel literature existing at the end of 2009 in order to draw generalizable conclusions for practice. We aimed to quantify effect sizes, update earlier work, include additional outcome measures, and address the methodological issue of self-selection.Methods: We computed elasticities for individual studies and pooled them to produce weighted averages.Results and conclusions: Travel variables are generally inelastic with respect to change in measures of the built environment. Of the environmental variables considered here, none has a weighted average travel elasticity of absolute magnitude greater than 0.39, and most are much less. Still, the combined effect of several such variables on travel could be quite large. Consistent with prior work, we find that vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is most strongly related to measures of accessibility to destinations and secondarily to street network design variables. Walking is most strongly related to measures of land use diversity, intersection density, and the number of destinations within walking distance. Bus and train use are equally related to proximity to transit and street network design variables, with land use diversity a secondary factor. Surprisingly, we find population and job densities to be only weakly associated with travel behavior once these other variables are controlled.Takeaway for practice: The elasticities we derived in this meta-analysis may be used to adjust outputs of travel or activity models that are otherwise insensitive to variation in the built environment, or be used in sketch planning applications ranging from climate action plans to health impact assessments. However, because sample sizes are small, and very few studies control for residential preferences and attitudes, we cannot say that planners should generalize broadly from our results. While these elasticities are as accurate as currently possible, they should be understood to contain unknown error and have unknown confidence intervals. They provide a base, and as more built-environment/travel studies appear in the planning literature, these elasticities should be updated and refined.Research support: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
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Perales F. and Vidal S. Looking inwards: towards a geographically sensitive approach to occupational sex segregation, Regional Studies. This article questions implicit assumptions in the literature and explores the issue of occupational sex segregation from a geographical standpoint. Specifically, variation in the gender compositions of occupations, the degree of occupational sex dissimilarity, and the impact of occupational feminization on wages across local labour markets in England and Wales is uncovered and explained. These findings imply that occupational sex segregation and its outcomes are contingent on the local context, that policies aimed at achieving gender equality at work should be channelled through local authorities, and that further research should be devoted to exploring systematically the multiple intersections between geographical space and gender equality at work.
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In this paper, we investigate regional differences in the gender pay gap both theoretically and empirically. Within a spatial model of monopsonistic competition, we show that more densely populated labour markets are more competitive and constrain employers’ ability to discriminate against women. Utilizing a large administrative data set for western Germany and a flexible semi-parametric propensity score matching approach, we find that the unexplained gender pay gap for young workers is substantially lower in large metropolitan than in rural areas. This regional gap in the gap of roughly 10 percentage points remained surprisingly constant over the entire observation period of 30 years.
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This study analyses of the determinants of long distance travel in Great Britain using data from the 1995–2006 National Travel Surveys (NTSs). The main objective is to determine the effects of socio-economic, demographic and geographic factors on long distance travel. The estimated models express the distance travelled for long distance journeys as a function of income, gender, age, employment status, household characteristics, area of residence, size of municipality, type of residence and length of time living in the area. A time trend is also included to capture common changes in long distance travel over time not included in the explanatory variables. Separate models are estimated for total travel, travel by each of four modes (car, rail, coach and air), travel by five purposes (business, commuting, leisure, holiday and visiting friends and relatives (VFRs)) and two journey lengths (<150 miles and 150+ miles one way), as well as the 35 mode-purpose-distance combinations.
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Many studies have shown that women work closer to home than do men, but few have probed the reasons for this persistent finding and none has done so at the metropolitan scale or considered the link between journey-to-work patterns and the occupational segregation of women. We first review the various possible reasons for women's shorter journeys to work and then examine each of these with data from the Baltimore, Maryland SMSA. We compare the work-trip distances and times of 303 employed women with those of 484 men, drawn from the 1977 Baltimore Travel Demand Data. As expected, women's work trips are significantly shorter than men's in both travel time and distance Women's lower incomes, their concentration in female-dominated occupations, and their greater reliance on the bus and auto passenger modes all help to explain their shorter work trips Male-female differences in part— versus full-time work status, occupational group, and, most surprisingly, household responsibility, did not, however, contribute to explaining observed gender differences in joumey-to-work patterns. We also found that the difference in the home and work locations of women and men could explain women's shorter work trips. A higher proportion of women than of men live and work in the central city, where journey to work distances are shorter, and there is some evidence that female-dominated employment opportunities are more uniformly distributed over the SMSA whereas male-dominated jobs are clustered in certain districts. We conclude that working women are more sensitive to distance than men are for reasons related more to their mobility than to their "dual roles" of wage earner/homemaker Also, because of women's sensitivity to commuting distance, the location of different types of employment opportunities is likely to play a role in the occupational segregation of women.
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Regressions explaining the wage rates of white males, black males, and white females are used to analyze the white-black wage differential among men and the male-female wage differential among whites. A distinction is drawn between reduced form and structural wage equations, and both are estimated. They are shown to have very different implications for analyzing the white-black and male-female wage differentials. When the two sets of estimates are synthesized, they jointly imply that 70 percent of the overall race differential and 100 percent of the overall sex differential are ultimately attributable to discrimination of various sorts.
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We examine the relationship between commuting patterns and distances travelled for labour markets in England and Wales and find that there is considerable spatial heterogeneity. To explain the observed spatial variation in the distance–decay of commute trips, we test for the effects of urban structure and transport supply. The results indicate that these factors are important in explaining the observed heterogeneity in the magnitude of the distance–decay gradients. We find that larger, less circular labour markets, with a less urbanized spatial structure and a greater jobs–housing imbalance are associated with a flatter distance–decay of commuting trips. Similar effects are found for labour markets with a more specialized industrial structure and greater availability of railway infrastructure. These are reasonable results since labour markets with the characteristics described above will tend to have a higher proportion of medium and long distance commutes.
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This paper provides an extensive analysis of the wage effects of inter‐regional mobility within Germany. Comparing skilled region‐type movers with skilled non‐migratory establishment movers we find clear evidence of an additional effect of inter‐regional mobility which becomes fully effective after three years. The highest returns are obtained by young workers and by rural‐urban movers. The introduction of fixed district and establishment effects tackles the notorious nuisance of regional price‐level differences and reveals that the mobility returns can be decomposed into roughly equal contributions of human capital accumulation and search gains. Resumen Este artículo proporciona un amplio análisis de los efectos salariales de la movilidad interregional en Alemania. Al comparar a la mano de obra cualificada que se traslada entre tipos de regiones con la también cualificada no migratoria que solo se traslada entre empleos, encontramos pruebas claras de un efecto adicional de la movilidad interregional que se hace plenamente efectivo al cabo de tres años. Los retornos más elevados los obtienen los trabajadores jóvenes y los que se trasladan de medio rural al urbano. La introducción de efectos fijos por distrito y empleo contrarrestan el notorio fastidio de las diferencias regionales del nivel de precios y revela que los retornos a la movilidad pueden atribuirse más o menos a partes iguales entre la acumulación de capital humano y la mejora en la búsqueda de empleo.
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Abstract The restructuring of the U.S. economy has resulted in the expansion and suburbanization of office employment. One theory is that an attraction of suburban locations is their large supply of women whose domestic responsibilities restrict their employment prospects and job-search area, spatially entrapping themin their neighborhood of residence. Firms employing large numbers of pink collar workers may relocate to the suburbs to employ these spatially entrapped women. I examine the applicability of the spatial-entrapment thesis underpinning much of the literature on the changing geography of office locations, gender divisions of labor, and urban labor markets. I use “triangulation” as a research strategy that involves the analysis of a variety of overlapping work-place and residential-based commuting studies and indepth, interactive interviews with the personnel managers of suburban offices and suburban women employed as clerical workers. The results show that, contrary to “conventional wisdom,” commutes and that neither the presence of another adult nor children in the household decreases a woman's work-trip. A reconceptualization of the spatial-entrapment thesis is offered, which attempts to untagle the relationship between women's commutes and the extent to which they are enmeshed in an evolving, complex web of localized relations.
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Typically, the high level of aggregation in conventional analysis of urban commuting may obscure meaningful differences among groups of commuters. This paper disaggregates US census datasets, taking commuters' gender and occupation into consideration. Refined measures—jobs/workers ratio, average commuting distance and the number of in- and out-commuters—are introduced through the disaggregate approach and are tested for gender differences. Using US Census Transport Planning Package (CTPP) data for Rochester, MN, this study shows the spatial structure of the labour market among 18 worker groups. The results bear important implications for regional labour market plans considering the spatial mismatch between jobs and housing.
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Commuting ties between rural places of residence and urban places of employment are among the most visible forms of rural–urban integration. For some rural areas, access to urban employment is a key source of population retention and growth. However, this access varies considerably across rural areas, with distance representing a primary deterrent. In addition to distance, the size of the urban community will also influence rural-to-urban commuting opportunities. In this paper, using Canadian data, we empirically estimated the influence of local rural population and job growth on rural out-commuting within the urban hierarchy. We find consistent support for the deconcentration hypothesis where population moves to rural areas for lifestyle and quality of life reasons, while retaining urban employment. Further, we find some evidence that in addition to distance from the nearest urban center being a deterrent, increased remoteness from the top of the urban hierarchy exerts a positive influence on out-commuting. Recognition of these types of rural–urban linkages through commuting is essential in designing Canadian rural policy and targeted programs that may effectively support local rural populations. In particular, they point to the need to have reasonable transportation infrastructure for urban accessibility, which should be complemented by other “built” infrastructure to improve the livability of rural communities.