Revisiting the gender gap incommuting through self-employment
Revisiting the gender gap incommuting through self-employment
This study employs a novel method to shed new light on disagreement in the literature over the relative contributions of household responsibilities vs labour market factors, and of preferences vs constraints, in accounting for shorter commutes among women. The self-employed are used as comparison group to employees as they have a greater choice over their work location thus enabling us to better control for locational labour market constraints on commutes that typically apply to employees. We use longitudinal data for the United Kingdom and modelling techniques that address issues of selection effects into self-employment and unobserved heterogeneity, for example personality traits, preferences and gender role attitudes. We find little evidence for a gender gap in commuting time among the self-employed suggesting that women do not have a preference per se for short commutes while existing evidence of shorter commutes of women among employees is confirmed. This longitudinal study demonstrates that gender patterns among employees’ commutes are better explained by labour market factors than household responsibility. We conclude that gendered labour market spatial structures and opportunities are more powerful constraints on women’s commuting than the domestic sphere.
commute time, gender, household responsibility, labour market
Reuschke, Darja
224493ce-38bc-455d-9341-55f8555e7e13
Houston, Donald
19da32ef-bd74-4c72-8c99-1be5728340cb
May 2020
Reuschke, Darja
224493ce-38bc-455d-9341-55f8555e7e13
Houston, Donald
19da32ef-bd74-4c72-8c99-1be5728340cb
Reuschke, Darja and Houston, Donald
(2020)
Revisiting the gender gap incommuting through self-employment.
Journal of Transport Geography, 85, [102712].
(doi:10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2020.102712).
Abstract
This study employs a novel method to shed new light on disagreement in the literature over the relative contributions of household responsibilities vs labour market factors, and of preferences vs constraints, in accounting for shorter commutes among women. The self-employed are used as comparison group to employees as they have a greater choice over their work location thus enabling us to better control for locational labour market constraints on commutes that typically apply to employees. We use longitudinal data for the United Kingdom and modelling techniques that address issues of selection effects into self-employment and unobserved heterogeneity, for example personality traits, preferences and gender role attitudes. We find little evidence for a gender gap in commuting time among the self-employed suggesting that women do not have a preference per se for short commutes while existing evidence of shorter commutes of women among employees is confirmed. This longitudinal study demonstrates that gender patterns among employees’ commutes are better explained by labour market factors than household responsibility. We conclude that gendered labour market spatial structures and opportunities are more powerful constraints on women’s commuting than the domestic sphere.
Text
MANUSCRIPT JTRG_2019_331_accepted
- Accepted Manuscript
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 11 April 2020
e-pub ahead of print date: 30 April 2020
Published date: May 2020
Additional Information:
Funding Information:
This study was funded by the European Research Council , the Starting Grant WORKANDHOME ( ERC- 2014-STG 639403 ).
Keywords:
commute time, gender, household responsibility, labour market
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 439428
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/439428
ISSN: 0966-6923
PURE UUID: 21f2a2b4-62dc-40c8-b4ac-083ac5cbd05e
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Date deposited: 22 Apr 2020 16:32
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 05:29
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Author:
Donald Houston
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