# **1. INTRODUCTION AND REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE**

**Transport planning should not be gender neutral** (Dominguez Gonzalez _et al_ ., 2020). Even if transport related improvements seem to benefit women and men equally, women and men experience transport and infrastructure differently in terms of affordability, acceptability, and availability (Alam _et al_ ., 2022). Lack of safe transport can reduce women’s access to economic opportunities (International Labor Organization, 2017). For example, global evidence suggests that the lack of proper infrastructure heavily influences women’s decision to cycle (Garrard _et al_ ., 2008), contributing to gender inequity in access to jobs and other opportunities in parts of the urban areas where such infrastructure is unavailable. In addition, there is a recognition that there are other, non-transport-related barriers that can constrain women’s mobility, such as social norms regarding gender, unequal division of household responsibilities, and other more personal elements influencing women’s agency, such as self-efficacy and aspirations (Dominguez Gonzalez _et al_ ., 2020). Unfortunately, regardless of these differences, transport planning has mainly focused on unidirectional travel from home to work, paying less attention to, for instance, shorter trips associated with “mobility of care”, which are typically carried out by women (Sánchez de Madariaga, 2013).

**Gender influences the decision to travel in the first place and, specifically, mode choices and trip patterns.** It was not until the last decade that data on mobility in Latin America started to be genderdisaggregated in origin-destination surveys, for instance, in Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, and Mexico City. Evidence on women’s mobility from Latin America seems to resemble that from some developed countries in terms of modal choice, distance, and travel purpose. Data shows that women travel shorter distances, have more complex multimodal trips, and walk and rely on public transport more than men. Women have less access to cars and motorcycles, while the lack of proper infrastructure widens the gender gap in the usage of bicycles. Existing data from San Jose, Costa Rica, and Mexico City, Mexico, support these findings. Gender differences are also prevalent in terms of travel time. Except for Bogota (Colombia) and Montevideo (Uruguay), cities in Latin America show longer travel times for men, suggesting that men travel longer distances and that women tend to prefer to, or are forced to, work from home or close to home, being constrained in their access to economic opportunities (Perez, 2019).

**Women’s mobility constraints can be disproportionally affected by external shocks.** The available evidence on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mobility reveals that it affected women’s mobility through less economic capacity for transport and less time available for journeys (González-Sánchez _et al_ ., 2021). The pandemic and the related restrictions mainly impacted the economic activities where women have higher representation, such as the hospitality industry and low-paid and informal jobs, which led women to either stop working altogether or turn to part-time jobs. At the same time, women’s mobility seems to have been higher during the pandemic than men’s, as they are disproportionately more employed in sectors that require physical presence such as health and social services. Based on mobile data analysis from Barcelona, low-income people, the majority of them women, were not able to reduce their travel due to being employed as frontline workers (Mejía-Dorantes _et al_ ., 2021). This “mandatory” travel that particularly affected women also includes household related activities (e.g., medical visits, shopping), which increased during the pandemic. In addition, women bearing higher responsibilities at home, derived, for instance, from home schooling, had even less time for traveling, with this effect being even more predominant for single parents (González-Sánchez _et al_ ., 2021) _._