Spatio-temporal heterogeneities in human mobility: a gender perspective

Abstract

The movement of people (aka human mobility) impacts several sectors of society such as health, security, economics and politics. Studying specific patterns in mobility such as gender is a complex task because analysing a single dimension requires a rich understanding of the wide range of mechanisms and interactions that can shape the mobility of women and men. In this thesis, we focus on gender groups to broadly understand their mobility patterns, which might reflect (and influence) inequalities from cultural constructs and the labour market.

Cultural constructs impose different roles on women and men, translating into how each gender participates in the labour market. Women are usually pressured to participate in jobs related to care and household responsibilities, while men usually take jobs related to leadership and high financial return. In this way, job sectors have an imbalanced participation of each gender, which in turn, reflects in how people move in space and time.

This thesis presents the spatio-temporal patterns in the mobility of women and men for four countries: Brazil, Colombia, the United States of America and the United Kingdom. We contribute to the literature with a novel mobility pattern — mobility diversity — that estimates the spatial distribution of mobility across metropolitan areas and unveils differences in the mobility of women and men. Furthermore, we demonstrate the existence of two profiles of cities that share similar mobility patterns that can contribute to the understanding of systematic issues in mobility.

Cultural constructs, labour market, and mobility reinforce human behaviours and consequently affects inequalities feeding into the formation of new cultural constructs. To break this cycle, we study idiosyncrasies of the dimension with the most data availability: mobility.