How the Interplay of Gender, Care Work, and Couple Dynamics Is Expressed in the Journey to Work: A Study of Travel Times to Work in the Dallas/Fort Worth MSA

Studies of the gender gap in travel to work reach back to the 1970s when increasing numbers of women began to join the paid labor force. What these early researchers found, and what continues to be found today, is that men travel further and longer to work than their female counterparts. This project is an extension of this lineage of research. The project uses characteristics of married couples’ homes and workplaces to gain an understanding of why the act of commuting between home and work is gendered. The project uses the American Community Survey 2015–2019 Public Use Microdata Sample for the Dallas/Fort Worth Metropolitan Statistical Area to craft a sample of 20,558 married couples. With journey-to-work times as the variable of interest, a generalized additive model was used to explore how gender, home, and work shape travel behavior. The results of this work suggest that the expectation that women be the primary performers of caregiving labor both inside and outside the home results in gendered differences in travel to work. Moreover, the finding that caregiving encumbers women’s paid work opportunities in multiple ways confirms that women as workers in both the home and the workplace should not be viewed as an undifferentiated female labor force.