Women Drivers! (Am I Right, Folks?)

by Tony Chavira

A few interesting commuting and traffic studies which came out recently have all pointed to the fact that women A) always prefer to work closer to home and B) hate traffic significantly more than guys do (and are affected by long commutes more negatively).  According to a University of Sheffield study, commuting actually has a particularly averse affect on the well-being of women compared to men.  Here's the kicker from the abstract:

We explore possible explanations for this gender difference and can find no evidence that it is due to women´s shorter working hours or weaker occupational position. Rather women´s greater sensitivity to commuting time seems to be a result of their larger responsibility for day-to-day household tasks, including childcare.

What this study ultimately says is that since women equally prioritize their roles in the household with their roles at work, time spent hanging out in slow and incessant traffic is especially frustrating.  Not to say that traffic in general isn't a pain in the ass, because it very clearly is for everyone.  The unpredictability of traffic is part of the problem, as daily inconsistent can have a psychological toll on anyone.  Another has to do with commute time, which can exponentially increases your trauma factor.  Women in particular tend to have a tendency to commute less, and adding children to the family only serves to make women want to spend less time in traffic (I can totally relate to this by the way, my mother worked across the street from my home growing up and wouldn't have wanted it any other way).  I'd compound this with some pretty scary research that convicted sex offenders also tend to stay pretty close to home, so I can't see many women wanting their kids to be latch-key.  But recent studies show, in fact, that fewer women are working in areas areas where there are longer commutes to work.  In the case I'm referring to, it was found that more women tended to work in Minneapolis than in New York City, but the findings were pretty striking:

[...]The number of employed, married women, and their annual hours worked, varies significantly across cities.[...] The increase in the labor supply of married women differs among cities, both in magnitude and timing. “What is surprising about the picture is how different the paths are for two particular urban locations, New York and Minneapolis,” said [Professor Dan A.] Black.

That's right, women who are married and/or with children will (rather than move closer) choose not to work at all.  And it has less to do with the idea of "they don't have to" than it has to do with the idea of prioritizing work and home responsibilities equally.  People are always happier when they live close to home though: they don't feel like they're wasting time trying to piece themselves back together after a hectic day of work. Besides, there are definitely larger things to worry about than whether you can get home fast enough to make dinner for the kids. Too bad traffic and commuting makes that should seem so simple such an ordeal. 

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