Gender and mobility: new approaches for informing sustainability

Abstract

Feminists have long known that gender and mobility are inseparable, influencing each other in profound and often subtle ways. Tackling complex societal problems, such as sustainability, will require improved understandings of the relationships between gender and mobility. In this essay I propose new approaches to the study of mobility and gender that will provide the knowledge base needed to inform policies on sustainable mobility. Early in the essay I survey the large literature on gender and mobility, teasing out what I see as two disparate strands of thinking that have remained badly disconnected from each other. One of these strands has informed understandings of how mobility shapes gender, while the other has examined how gender shapes mobility. Work on how mobility shapes gender has emphasized gender, to the neglect of mobility, whereas research on how gender shapes mobility has dealt with mobility in great detail and paid much less attention to gender. From this overview of the literature, I identify knowledge gaps that must be bridged if feminist research on gender and mobility is to assist in charting paths to sustainable mobility. I argue for the need to shift the research agenda so that future research will synthesize these two strands of thinking along three lines: (1) across ways of thinking about gender and mobility, (2) across quantitative and qualitative approaches, and (3) across places. In the final part of the essay I suggest how to achieve this synthesis by making geographic, social and cultural context central to our analyses.

Hace mucho tiempo que los feministas saben que el género y la movilidad son inseparables, influenciándose mutuamente de profundas y a menudo sutiles maneras. Abordar problemas complejos de la sociedad tales como la sustentabilidad, requerirá mejor comprensión de las relaciones entre género y movilidad. En este ensayo propongo nuevos enfoques para el estudio de la movilidad y el género que proveerán la base de conocimiento necesaria para guiar las políticas sobre movilidad sustentable. Al comienzo del ensayo, repaso la gran cantidad de literatura sobre género y movilidad, separando lo que veo como dos corrientes de pensamiento diferentes que se han mantenido seriamente desconectadas entre sí. Una de estas corrientes ha hecho aportes a las formas de entender cómo la movilidad afecta al género, mientras la otra ha examinado cómo el género afecta a la movilidad. El trabajo sobre cómo la movilidad afecta al género ha puesto el énfasis en el género, descuidando la movilidad, mientras que la investigación sobre cómo el género afecta la movilidad ha abordado la movilidad en gran detalle, prestándole mucha menos atención al género. Desde este repaso de la literatura, identifico los vacíos que deben ser llenados en el conocimiento si la investigación feminista sobre género y movilidad pretende marcar el camino hacia una movilidad sustentable. Propongo que hay necesidad de cambiar la agenda de investigación, de manera que en el futuro ésta sintetice estas dos corrientes de pensamiento a lo largo de tres líneas: (1) a través de formas de pensar sobre género y movilidad, (2) a través de enfoques cualitativos y cuantitativos, y (3) a través de lugares. Al final del trabajo sugiero cómo lograr esta síntesis haciendo centrales en nuestro análisis los contextos geográficos, sociales y culturales.

Keywords:

• gender
• mobility
• sustainable mobility
• Frances Willard
• context

Keywords:

• género
• movilidad
• movilidad sustentable
• Frances Willard
• contexto

Acknowledgements

This article grew out of the Jan Monk Lecture, presented at the University of Arizona and then the Association of American Geographers in spring 2009; some of the ideas in this article were also presented in the Martin Wachs Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley in October 2008 and in a workshop on gender and mobility at the University of Malmo, Sweden in May 2009. I appreciate the comments and discussion that followed these presentations. Thanks to Susan Blickstein, fellow cyclist, who celebrated completing her PhD by giving me a copy of Frances Willard's book. Thanks also to Megan Blake, Sophie Bowlby, Susan Blickstein, Melissa Gilbert, Mei-Po Kwan, Jan Monk, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Lydia Savage and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the penultimate draft.

Notes

 1. The WCTU was formed in 1873 in Illinois to fight against the destructive influence of alcohol on families and society and to push for Prohibition.

 2. As another example, Elder (2003) describes the confinement of women who were living illegally in hostels in South African mining areas in the early 1990s.

 3. I do not mean to imply that every study that has shed light on how mobility shapes gender has all of these characteristics; rather, at the risk of over-generalizing, I wish to highlight what I see as the hallmarks of this line of work.

 4. This pattern mainly reflects the costs and availability of appropriate data.

 5. It is interesting that in each strand of work, it is the dependent variable that is the main focus of attention; the independent variable is less well specified. Not every study that has examined gendered mobility in detail, however, has failed to theorize gender.

 6. For example, geographic context may be specified simply as location in one of the nine Census regions or by location in an urban area of a particular population size grouping.

 7. McLafferty and Preston used the Public Use Microdata Sample from the US Bureau of the Census.

 8. Examples of other such problems include (1) the relationship of physical activity to health/ obesity and (2) the nature of inequality.

 9. Using a national sample from Sweden, Polk (2003) shows that women are more critical of automobile use and more likely to tie auto use to environmental damage than are men, but the links between such attitudes and travel behavior are not clear.

10. This tension between the general and the specific is not unique to feminist geography. A strong move is now afoot throughout the human and ecological sciences toward place-based, context-sensitive science, especially in the emergent area of sustainability science (Kates and Clark 1999); this approach recognizes that the outcomes of multiple and often complex general processes (such as those leading to urban sprawl) are inflected by the particular conjunction of history, politics and landscape in place. As a result, no single approach to, say, sustainable mobility will provide a universally effective solution.

11. As Ragin (1987) points out, doing so will entail paying attention to variables as well as cases and taking history seriously, inter alia.