What Explains the Gender Gap in Schlepping? Testing Various Explanations for Gender Differences in Household-Serving Travel

What Explains the Gender Gap in Schlepping? Testing Various Explanations for Gender Differences in Household-Serving Travel ∗ Brian D. Taylor, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs Kelcie Ralph, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Michael Smart, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Objectives. Many gender differences in travel have begun to converge. Has convergence occurred for household-serving travel, which constitutes a very large and growing share of all trips? Moreover, what explains the division of household-serving travel in heterosexual couples? In answering these questions, we test the salience of three theories about the gendered division of household labor: (1) time availability, (2) microeconomic, and (3) gender socialization. Methods. Using data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from 2003 to 2012, we calculated the female-to-male ratio of household-serving trips in several types of households (i.e., singles vs. couples and male vs. female breadwinner households). Results. There was some empirical support for each theory, but we find the most consistent and compelling evidence for gender socialization. We observe substantial gender differences in child- and household-serving trips apart from household formation; even in households where women earn more, are better educated, or work more hours than their partners, women still make about half again as many child-serving and grocery-shopping trips as their male partners. Conclusion. Despite dramatic changes in women’s labor force participation over the past half-century, the gender division of household-serving travel remains strong. As women increasingly entered the labor force over the past few decades, dual-earner households became more widespread, and many longstanding gender differences in travel behavior began to converge. While gender differences in paid work, household labor, and commuting have been studied extensively, the division of household-serving travel has received less attention. We examine this issue by asking (1) what is the gender division of household-serving travel in the United States today? and (2) what explains this divi- sion? To answer these questions, we draw on detailed time use surveys from a nationally representative sample of adults. While our focus is on household-serving travel, we pay par- ticular attention to female labor force participation because, for many couples, employment decisions are thought to be closely linked with household responsibilities. Direct correspondence to Brian D. Taylor, Institute of Transportation Studies, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, 3250 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA 90095 btaylor@g.ucla.edu. This research was supported by a grant from both the U.S. and California Departments of Transportation through the University of California Transportation Center, and the authors are grateful for this support. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors and not the funding agencies. The authors thank Chelsea Richer for her assistance with the literature review for this analysis, and Joseph Issa for his assistance with copyediting and formatting. The authors agree to make available the data used in this analysis for coding and replication purposes. SOCIAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY, Volume 96, Number 5, November 2015 C 2015 by the Southwestern Social Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.12203