Of all the professional gains women have made over the past several decades, one stubborn measure of inequality – the gender pay gap – has been particularly difficult to stamp out. And it’s a disparity that can largely be traced to parenthood. In almost every country on Earth, the arrival of children coincides with a permanent decline in employment and earnings for mothers, but not for fathers. Conversations about how to better support working mothers typically focus on family policy, such as subsidized child care and paid parental leave. But one important factor affecting mothers’ employment is still less discussed: commuting.
Of course, this is not a very sexy topic. But a growing body of research shows that whether a mom can hold on to her job depends on how long it takes her to get there. In particular, the important role of travel time in shaping maternal employment has been recognized not only in the United States but also in countries with much stronger family policies and social safety nets. Travel also affects women up and down the socio-economic scale (although in different ways).
The negative impact of commuting is so obvious that it’s hard to imagine streamlining the economy for moms without acknowledging its impact. And the solution to the travel penalty may be as difficult as it is simple: To help moms work outside the home, society needs to make it easier for them to work. near Home.
Transportation is largely a modern phenomenon. But mobility barriers have long controlled the work women can do. Nearly half a century ago, anthropologist Judith K. Brown had observed that throughout history, women had gravitated toward jobs with characteristics that suited them to child care: they did not require “spirited concentration”, they were relatively repetitive and easy to interrupt and start again, and they did not require women to travel far from home. In post-industrial societies, many of the requirements described by Brown for making work compatible with child-rearing have become less relevant; For example, women work in all types of industries that require focused concentration. But distance from home – which certainly affects commute times – may play a bigger role than ever in employment-based gender inequality, as other factors such as gaps in education between men and women decline in importance.
The study that appears to have sparked most of the research on commuting was published about a decade ago. It found that in American cities where average commute times are longer, married women have lower workforce-participation rates. A few years ago, researchers attempted to replicate the finding with more detailed data taken from 272 cities across the country, and found that it held up: A 10-minute increase in average commute time makes married women in the area 4.4 percent less likely to work. This effect was driven entirely by mothers, increasing with the number of children they had, and was larger for those with younger children. “I think this is very strong evidence that traveling is bad,” study co-author Jordi Joffre-Monceni told me, “but especially for women.”
Even when commuting doesn’t lead moms to leave the workforce entirely, it may shape the jobs they take. A recently published working paper used an unusually rich data set to document the career moves people make before and after becoming parents. It found that before becoming parents, both men and women make steady progress in their careers, moving into better-paying companies and moving into higher-paying jobs within those companies. But once children come into the picture, mothers (not fathers) tend to move to jobs at lower-paying employers or in completely different industries; For example, mothers may move from finance to health care or education. Brendan Timpe, an economics professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and co-author of the paper, told me, it appears that mothers are trading lower pay for flexibility or other accommodations. She and her colleagues found that many mothers moving to lower-paying employers were opting for jobs with part-time hours, more remote work opportunities, and less travel.
These findings are not unique to the United States. A 2022 study of Belgian data found that, like many other countries, a large employment gap opens up between men and women after becoming parents – largely because mothers are much more likely than fathers to leave their jobs outside their local area. A study this year using data from Norway found that mothers reduce their commute times significantly more than fathers after childbirth, leaving them with fewer and lower quality job opportunities. And a paper last year, looking at Germany, found that women’s willingness to sacrifice wages for less travel increases 130 percent after the birth of their child and does not begin to decline again until the child is 12 years old.
Collectively, these studies show that commuting is a barrier to employment for mothers regardless of their socio-economic status, but the way in which they navigate their careers varies. A paper published in June found that mothers without a college degree are more likely than college-educated mothers to leave the workforce due to long commutes. Meanwhile, Timpe’s paper found that among mothers who remained in the workforce but switched to lower-paid jobs (e.g. for benefits such as less commute), the highest-paid mothers suffered the most. “If you think about the people who work at Goldman Sachs, you know that’s really where you see the biggest declines,” Timpe said. And of course, some mothers don’t have the option of leaving the labor market: Another paper found that although commute distance widens the gender pay gap among all mothers, it has a slightly smaller effect among single mothers, who have no choice but to work, no matter how terrible the traffic.
It’s worth explaining why traveling is such a headache for parents. First, the longer your trip, the more child care you will need and the less time you will have to spend with your children. But many of the researchers I spoke to for this article believed that the attraction of short trips lies less with the time people save in a typical day and more with their ability to reliably visit their children.
Arriving from day care or school on time is an essential part of the parenting schedule; Long journeys increase the risk of something, whether traffic or train delays, causing disruption. Even if a child doesn’t need their parents for afternoon chores or emergencies every day Any On certain days, they may need a parent: children get sick, have a doctor’s appointment, forget their lunch box, or have a gathering or other event that requires a parent’s attendance. “All of these activities take time, and it can be hard to execute them in a situation where you need 45 minutes or an hour to get back and forth from work,” Ilaria D’Angelis, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and co-author of the June paper, told me. And although the need to quickly access a child may come up relatively rarely, Timpe said, “You have to make a major employment decision based on it.” A parent may adjust or limit their work to ensure they can be close to their children – and statistically speaking, this is usually the mother.
The incidence of long commutes for women could be made less punitive if more men modified their careers to be closer to children. But this does not so much solve the problem as redistribute it; If more fathers were to suffer this, the burden of commuting would simply be shifted onto them, rather than helping more parents, whether mothers or fathers, take on higher paying jobs. One possible solution: Employers could offer flexible hours, or reduce the career-disrupting impact of travel by allowing more employees to work from home. D’Angelis said such flexibility is probably one reason why commuting is less likely to push highly educated women out of the labor market; Such women generally have a better chance of finding work that can be done remotely. For those who do not have the ability to work from home, efforts to reduce congestion or invest in faster and more reliable public transportation – worthy goals, though much harder to achieve – will almost certainly help.
Yet another option would be to find ways to enable people to live closer to where they work. A recent study, examining how the travel penalty is linked to the spatial distribution of jobs, found something that sounds blindly obvious but is worth teasing: A mother’s preference for a shorter trip penalizes her only if working on it means sacrificing a higher-paying opportunity. Consider the finance industry, in which good jobs are typically concentrated in city centres. Citian Liu, an economics professor at Queens University in Ontario, Canada, told me that among financial workers living in American city centers, the gender pay gap or commutation penalty is not seen much. This makes sense because if you live in the financial district, the need or desire for a short commute has little impact on women’s ability to access high-paying jobs. Only in the suburbs does a larger gender commuting gap – and the resulting gender pay gap – emerge among finance workers.
But things look different in other high-skill, high-paying industries like medicine. For example, balancing work and parenthood as a physician is no easy feat, no matter how far away one is from one’s workplace. Because hospitals and doctors’ offices are more geographically distributed, however, female doctors are less likely to be penalized for living in the suburbs than finance workers, Liu explained; Those who decide to live outside the city still have access to high-paying, nearby jobs. Together, these findings point to two ways to reduce the commute penalty: Make it easier for more mothers to live close to existing job hubs – perhaps by building more family-friendly housing in urban centers – or spread out the jobs.
Motherhood will probably always shape women’s participation in the economy. But commute-penalty research shows that mothers’ ability to work depends on practical, often flexible aspects of how that work fits into their daily lives. When mothers “are in a position where they can really reconcile their family life with their work life,” they do so, D’Angelis said. The task of a society intent on reducing gender pay inequality is to create the conditions where that kind of harmony is possible.
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