**The current paper studies recent mobility patterns in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (** **_AMBA for its Spanish acronym_ ) – the largest urbanized area in Argentina and one of the largest in Latin America – to propose specific areas of transport policy that can target women’s travel needs.** To do so, the paper leverages _big data_ and complementary data to identify transport patterns that are distinct between men and women, including in terms of the spatial patterns, distances traveled, the temporal distribution of trips throughout the day, and mode choices. Second, the paper analyzes the gender-differentiated changes in mobility patterns associated with the pandemic, a significant shock that affected both transport supply and travel preferences, some of which have persisted even three years later. Understanding these gender-differentiated responses is important for developing policy solutions that can steer the mobility choices towards more sustainable modes if a similar shock were to occur in the future.

# **2. METHODOLOGY**

**The analysis takes advantage of a number of innovative data sources and methodologies that can provide complementary insights.** These include, first and foremost, Call Detail Record (CDR) – mobile phone – data, that are increasingly recognized as a valuable resource for transport planning. CDR data are observed for every call/text made or received with a timestamp and GPS coordinates of the tower from where the call is made. Such data allows measuring mobility across entire cities or even countries at very fine spatial and temporal levels. The analysis in the current paper is based on CDR data obtained for three different periods (October 2019, October 2020, and October 2021) from a major mobile phone service operator in Argentina, representing 37 percent of the national market, with over 8 million unique subscribers. The methodology fused CDR data with data from public transport validations (the SUBTE smart card in Buenos Aires) and publicly available household mobility survey data from 2010/2018 - _Encuestas de Movilidad Domiciliaria_ (ENMODO). In addition, the analysis incorporates data from a largescale interception survey and a stated-preference survey with private motorized transport users across AMBA implemented by the study team, respectively, in November-December 2021 and February- March 2022.

**The mobility indicators are calculated for personal mobility travel, filtering out from the origindestination (OD) matrices the trips associated with professional mobility (e.g., taxi drivers)** . The methodology for identifying professional mobility and overall methodology for calculating OD matrices generally follows other studies that have leveraged CDR data for mobility analysis (see, e.g. Bachir _et al_ ., 2019; Bayir _et al_ ., 2010). The analysis is based on a total of 2,010 travel zones across the metropolitan area, of which 534 are in central Buenos Aires (Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, or CABA) and 1,476 in the Province of Buenos Aires (PBA). The CDR data sourced from the mobile phone operator was processed into OD matrices by following a verification process and developing algorithms that disaggregate the matrices into different modes (i.e., non-motorized, public transport, and private motorized), segment them into trip purposes (i.e., home-based trips to work, home-based trips to other activities, and nonhome based trips), and by gender and age (using anonymized client data available from the mobile operator, with gender-specific expansion factors applied based on the available household travel survey data for AMBA).

**The assessment of the mobility patterns distinguishes by socioeconomic (income) group.** This is done based on the spatial association of the identified travelers’ home locations and the socioeconomic