Sascha Kohlmann | CC BYND
<I WOULD START BY TELLING US, AT LEAST BROADLY, WHAT THE FINDINGS FOUND AND HOW THEY MIGHT BE USED TO GET MORE PEOPLE ON A BIKE. WHAT YOU’VE GOT AS YOUR CURRENT LEAD READS MORE LIKE A NUT GRAF>
A new study on the gap between the number of men and women who bike offers a fresh look at the circumstances in which the gender disparity has shrunk or disappeared over the past decade. Without attempting to explain why women in general bike less than men, it’s research that could help advocates better target their efforts to get more women in the saddle.
It is well known that women bike less than men do, but it isn’t clear why. To help un-muddy the waters, Jessica Schoner and Greg Lindsey at the University of Minnesota dove into a pile of fresh data on who’s biking around the Twin Cites, and how often. Their findings, presented in the paper “Factors Associated with the Gender Gap in Bicycling Over Time,” provide a more detailed understanding of where that gap exists, and could help those trying to close it.
The data come from the 2010-2012 Travel Behavior Inventory, a collection of studies on travel patterns conducted every 10 years by the Twin Cities-based Metropolitan Council. Data was self-reported by members of more than 14,000 households who kept a travel diary for a single day. Schoner and Lindsey compared the 2010 numbers with those from 2000, when respondents first had the option of listing cycling as a mode of travel. Although Schoner concedes “there are a lot of limitations to this study,” its conclusions are useful because they reveal where the gender gap is more or less pronounced.
The researchers turned up three especially interesting findings. The first is that in single-bicyclist homes, men are roughly twice as likely as women to ride. But when you’ve got two or more cyclists living together, that gap disappears. That could be because living with a cyclist encourages people of any gender to starting biking, or because people who enjoy cycling end up in the same home through marriage or friendship. “I don’t know what direction causality goes,” Schoner says.
The second finding is that among people who rode at least once on the day they kept their travel diary, there is no gender gap when it comes to the number of trips taken that day. In other words, women who ride do so just as frequently as men. “This suggests,” Schoner and Lindsey write, “that much of the remaining gender gap can be attributed to a participation gap, not an intensity gap.”
Finally, the 2010 data shows that having kids doesn’t lead to people biking less. That’s a change: In 2000, a parent was only half as likely to be a cyclist as a non-parent. There’s no gender difference here, but because women bear the greater burden when it comes to childcare, it’s encouraging news for those working to shrink the gender gap. “The relationship between having children and bicycling is complex and unclear,” Schoner says, but “having children may be becoming less of a barrier to bicycling over time.”
Schoner wouldn’t interpret the data to offer recommendations for getting more women into cycling, but for those working to close the gender gap, or just to get more women biking in general, it helps to have a more nuanced picture of the data. Outreach efforts, based on this research, would be more effectively targeted at women who don’t bike at all than at those who already ride. And maybe there’s a way to use the “contagion effect of living with a cyclist” as an advantage—though forced cohabitation may be a bit much.
No comments:
Post a Comment