Women’s Travel North and South: Changing Societal Trends and the Travel Patterns

Women are more impacted, generally negatively, than men by major societal trends like globalization, urbanization, motorization, and socio-demographic transitions because they have less access to better transport services and technologies, display very different travel patterns in which are embedded multiple domestic and parental responsibilities, and suffer more fear and anxiety in travel. These differences have far less traction among researchers and thus among policy makers than they should. How can we make both research and policy more responsive to the different needs of women in both developing and developed nations?

Dr. Sandra Rosenbloom is Professor of Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin, USA and the Director of the Innovation in Infrastructure program at the Urban Institute, Washington, DC. She is an internationally recognised expert on the transportation impacts of major societal changes such as suburbanization, globalization, the aging of society, and the labor force participation of women with children. A major emphasis of her work is assessing the equity of transportation planning and financing policies. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Planning Association, one of the world’s leading planning and urban development journals.