{"id":2635,"date":"2016-04-14T10:40:07","date_gmt":"2016-04-14T14:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/?p=2635"},"modified":"2016-04-14T10:40:07","modified_gmt":"2016-04-14T14:40:07","slug":"the-u-s-gender-gap-in-traffic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/2016\/04\/14\/the-u-s-gender-gap-in-traffic\/","title":{"rendered":"The U.S. Gender Gap in Traffic"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

“[A]n analysis of traffic can enrich sociological theory.” (Schmidt-Relenberg, 1968: 121)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Almost everywhere we go is a \u201cgendered space.\u201d\u00a0 Although men and women both go to grocery stores, different days of the week and times of the day are associated with different gender compositions of shoppers.\u00a0 Most of our jobs are gendered spaces.\u00a0 In fact, Census data show that roughly 30% of the 66,000,000 women<\/a> in the U.S. labor force occupy only 10 of the 503 listed occupations on the U.S. Census<\/a>.\u00a0 You\u2019d probably be able to guess what some of these jobs are just as easily as you might be able to guess some of the very few<\/a> Fortune 500 companies have women CEOs.\u00a0 Sociologists refer to this phenomenon as occupational segregation<\/a>, and it\u2019s nothing new.\u00a0 Recently, I did read about a gender segregated space that is new (at least to me): traffic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>When I picture traffic in my head, I think of grumpy men driving to jobs they hate, but this is a horrible stereotype of traffic that\u2019s misleading.\u00a0 Women actually make up the vast majority of congestion on the roads.\u00a0 One way of looking at this is to argue that women are causing<\/em> more congestion on our roads.\u00a0 But another way to talk about this issue (and the way to talk about this issue that is consistent with actual research – and ought to make us feminists smile) is to say that women endure<\/em> more congestion on the roads.<\/p>\n

Women were actually the first market for household automobiles in the U.S.\u00a0 Men generally traveled to work by public transportation.\u00a0 Cars sold to households were marketed to women for daily errands.\u00a0 This is why, for instance, early automobiles had fancy radiator caps with things like wings, angels and goddesses on them.\u00a0 These were thought to appeal to women\u2019s more fanciful desires.<\/p>\n

Traffic increased a great deal when women moved into the labor force.\u00a0 But this is not exactly what accounts for the gender gap.\u00a0 In the 1950s, car trips that were work-related accounted for about 40% of all car use.\u00a0 Today that number is less than 16%<\/a>.\u00a0 The vast majority of car trips are made for various errands: taking children to school, picking up groceries, eating out, going to or from day care, shopping, and more shopping.\u00a0 And it\u2019s women who are making most of these trips.\u00a0 It\u2019s a less acknowledged portion of the \u201csecond shift\u201d which typically highlights women\u2019s disproportionate contribution to the division of labor inside<\/em> the household even when they are working outside of the household as well.\u00a0 Sandra Rosenbloom<\/a>‘s work on this topic is fantastic (see her chapter summarizing some of her research here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Traffic research has shown that women are more than two times more likely than men to be taking someone else where they need to go when driving (see Nobis and Lenz’s chapter here <\/a>and Rosenbloom’s research here<\/a>). \u00a0Men are\u00a0 more likely to be driving themselves somewhere.\u00a0 Women are also much more likely to string other errands onto the trips in which they are driving themselves somewhere (like stopping at the grocery store on the drive home, going to day care on the way to work, etc.).\u00a0 Traffic experts call this \u201ctrip chaining<\/a>,\u201d but the rest of us call it multi-tasking.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, we also know that women, on average, leave just a bit later than men do for work, and as a result, are much more likely to be making those longer (and more involved) trips right in the middle of peak hours for traffic.<\/p>\n

Who knew?\u00a0 It\u2019s an under-acknowledged gendered space that deserves more attention (at least from sociologists).\u00a0 Traffic is awful, and if we count up all that extra time and add it to the second shift calculations made by Arlie Hochschild, I think we have a new form of inequality to complain about.<\/p>\n

___________________<\/p>\n

This post originally appeared at Inequality by (Interior) Design<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“[A]n analysis of traffic can enrich sociological theory.” (Schmidt-Relenberg, 1968: 121) Almost everywhere we go is a \u201cgendered space.\u201d\u00a0 Although men and women both go to grocery stores, different days of the week and times of the day are associated with different gender compositions of shoppers.\u00a0 Most of our jobs are gendered spaces.\u00a0 In fact, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1958,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1958"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2635"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2899,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2635\/revisions\/2899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}