Understanding Urban Mobility from a Gendered Perspective through Mobile Phone Data

The use of public transportation or simply moving about in streets are gendered issues. Women and girls often engage in multi-purpose, multi-stop trips in order to do household chores, work, and study (‘trip chaining’). Women-headed households are often more prominent in urban settings and they tend to work more in low-paid/informal jobs than men, with limited access to transportation subsidies.
In this talk, I will present recent results of a large collaborative project aimed at decoding the complexity of urban mobility from a gendered perspective by uniquely combining a wide range of datasets, including commercial sources of telecom and open data.
We explored urban mobility of women and men in the greater metropolitan area of Santiago, Chile, by analyzing the mobility traces extracted from the Call Detail Records (CDRs) of a large cohort of anonymized mobile phone users over a period of 3 months. To investigate gender differences in mobility behavior, we analyze gender disaggregated mobility patterns of users by computing the number of unique locations visited by each user and their associated frequency of visits. We find that, taking into account the differences in users’ calling behaviors, women move less than men, visiting less unique locations and distributing their time less equally among such locations. By mapping gender differences in mobility over the 52 “comunas” of Santiago, we find a higher mobility gap to be correlated with socio-economic indicators, such as a lower average income, and with the lack of public and private transportation options. Such results provide new insights for policymakers to design more gender inclusive transportation plans in the city of Santiago.

Lunch will be provided by HERUS Lab