Women’s complex daily lives: a gendered look at trip chaining and activity pattern entropy in Germany

Joachim Scheiner () and Christian Holz-Rau ()
Additional contact information
Joachim Scheiner: Technische Universität Dortmund
Christian Holz-Rau: Technische Universität Dortmund

Transportation, 2017, vol. 44, issue 1, No 6, 117-138

Abstract: Abstract It has long been argued in feminist studies that women’s daily lives are more complex than men’s. This is largely due to the gendered division of work, according to which women juggle more varied obligations, including employment, household work and caregiving. Complex activity patterns in turn encourage women to organise their trips in a more efficient manner in trip chains. This paper studies the complexity of activity patterns (measured by Shannon entropy) and trip chaining patterns from a gender specific perspective. The data used is the German Mobility Panel 1994–2012 which records respondents’ trips over the period of a week. The outcome variables are regressed on sociodemographics, residential and workplace spatial context attributes, cohort and period effects. Gender differences in the effects of variables are tested using interaction terms. The results suggest that women’s patterns are more complex than men’s. Some effects differed distinctly between men and women, suggesting that men and women are differently affected by circumstances impacting the complexity of their lives, most notably by having children and by having a partner.

Keywords: Activity pattern; Gender; Trip chain; Tour complexity; Travel behaviour; Entropy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11116-015-9627-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:transp:v:44:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s11116-015-9627-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11116/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11116-015-9627-9

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation is currently edited by Kay W. Axhausen

More articles in Transportation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().