Cities are undoubtedly the engines of our economy, but they are also places that are riddled with inequalities.  Research from the University of Exeter highlights how these inequalities can amplify the differences in how people travel within cities.

Cities have a huge range of potential opportunities for citizens to enjoy, but often capitalizing on them requires the ability to move about the city.  This ability underpins everything, from being able to study, socialize, work, or access healthcare.  The researchers find that our gender and our socioeconomic status play a significant role in our patterns of movement.

Influencing movement

For instance, they explain that women typically travel shorter distances than men do, but they argue that few have attempted to understand how gender and socioeconomic status work together to influence our mobility.

The researchers undertook a statistical analysis of data from a number of travel surveys conducted across South America.  The surveys attempted to understand how people traveled about their city and their current socioeconomic status.

The results chimed with previous studies showing that women tend to travel in a much smaller number of geographic areas than men.  The socioeconomic status of people was even more influential than their gender, however, with wealthier people seemingly more selective about the areas they traveled to. By contrast, middle-class people seemed to have the most diverse mobility patterns.  Those in the lower socioeconomic classes also tended to limit their movements, with the authors speculating that this may be due to a lack of affordable transportation.

Within these socioeconomic groups, however, men would still exhibit greater levels of mobility than their female peers, with this gender gap especially pronounced among upper classes.  As a result, the researchers believe that our socioeconomic status may exacerbate the gender differences that already exist.

Of course, the study was conducted in various South American cities, and so may not transfer to cities elsewhere in the world, but the researchers are confident that they are generalizable to other locations, and they plan to conduct further studies to test that theory, while also examining other characteristics, such as age and profession, to see what other factors may influence our mobility.

“Daily demands and responsibilities shape the mobility of women and men,” the authors conclude. “By studying the mobility of three metropolitan areas in South America, we found that the gender and the socioeconomic status of travelers contribute to the differences in how they move across the urban space.”