Women’s Issues in Transportation: Summary of the 4th International Conference, Volume 1: Conference Overview and Plenary Papers (2011)

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41 Women’s Travel Issues Creating Knowledge, Improving Policy, and Making Change Martin Wachs, Transportation, Space, and Technology, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California Since the first conference more than 30 years ago, the study of gender and transportation has become a legiti- mate focus of research. The transportation community has developed a deeper understanding of relationships between gender, travel, and many ways in which they are linked; however, major knowledge gaps remain that are deeply in need of research. Although we have learned more about traffic safety and gender, knowledge in that area has not advanced nearly as much as knowl- edge about travel patterns and choices. There has been far more analysis of gender issues with respect to travel, traffic, and safety and security in developed economies than in poorer societies undergoing rapid development, and there is deeper understanding of those issues. Fur- thermore, understanding of the historical evolution of relationships between gender and transportation remains rudimentary, and even within advanced urban soci- eties, knowledge has improved unevenly. Although great advances have been made in understanding gender dif- ferences in travel patterns in developed urban societies, there is much to learn about gender and mobility in rural areas and with respect to long-distance (intercity) travel, non-work-related travel, and air travel. Insufficient attention has been given to gender issues associated with employment and advancement within the transportation industry and with respect to transportation employees and professionals. Information technology and elec- tronic connectivity are already transforming relation- ships between gender and mobility, and that change is in need of systematic research and analysis. There have been few broad syntheses linking the several thematic areas discussed at this conference, and few studies have integrated social science analysis with broader theories of social change and gender in society. As we begin the Fourth International Confer-ence on Women’s Issues in Transportation, I am pleased to add my welcome to those already offered by colleagues who spoke earlier. Thank you for coming to lend your presence and your voice to an important undertaking. I hope to frame the issues we will be exploring together for several days and to stimulate your thinking by offering several challenges for our col- lective consideration throughout the conference. The first international conference in this series was held in 1978, the second in 1996, the third in 2004, and, of course, the fourth is being held today in 2009. The second conference took place 17 years after the first; the third 8 years after the second; and the fourth is taking place roughly 5 years after the third. Simple mathemati- cal projection would lead us to expect that we will be meeting next between 2 and 3 years from now, and that within a decade we will be holding a conference every few days. This projection must be very alarming to the TRB staff and to the organizing committee, who have worked so hard and so long to pull this event together for the benefit of all of us in attendance and those who will read the proceedings. We all know, however, that simple mathematical projections are always dangerous. That could also be true of projections made about the future of women’s travel patterns and of the place of women in the field of transportation.

42 WoMen’S ISSueS In TRAnSPoRTATIon, voluMe 1 It is well known to many of you that in the 1970s, when the concept of a conference on women’s travel issues was put forward, it was ridiculed as frivolous and used as an example of absurd wastefulness of pub- lic resources. Thanks to the leadership of some of the women who continue to shape this field and who are here with us again, and thanks to the intervention of some senior national figures—men and women—the first conference was held. It featured excellent presentations and discussions, and the published proceedings were and still are widely cited. The second and third conferences assured that the themes and topics discussed under the heading of “women’s travel issues” began to enter the mainstream of scholarly and policy discourse. A community of interest was nurtured by these events; people compared notes and exchanged data, studies were replicated, data collection gradually was institutional- ized, and trends were tracked over time. These are all important accomplishments that mark the maturing of an intellectual enterprise. In place of the anomalous set of inquiries at the edge of the mainstream with which we began 30 years ago, there are now graduate semi- nars, a stream of journal articles and books, and policy innovations all over the world addressing the theme of gender in transport. We have a session at this conference, for example, devoted to analysis and interpretation of a national law in Sweden intended to bring gender equality to public policy in the realm of transport and mobility. There is no doubt that there have been accomplishments of enormous import, and these conferences have been landmarks along the path of growth and change. exPloring gender and Mobility The word “mobility” interestingly is used in two different ways by social scientists. To those of us who study trans- portation, mobility most commonly is related to moving from place to place. When we say that we live in a highly mobile society we mean that people travel with increasing frequency, for a wide variety of purposes, by many modes, to increasingly diverse destinations. The term also refers, of course, to social mobility, with “upward mobility” being an increase in people’s ability to engage in satisfy- ing economic, social, and recreational activities. The use of the term “mobility” in both ways is sym- bolic of the themes that bring us together and of the evo- lution of knowledge over the time span marked by the four conferences. Physical mobility is about having the means to reach places, things, and activities, while social mobility is, very similarly, about access as well. Access can be limited by inadequate motive power or poor roads but also can be truncated by strictures placed on us by others in our lives, such as families, religious and social communities, and the nations in which we live (1). What we have learned and continue to explore together through this sequence of conferences is the importance of mobility of both types and how closely they interact in our lives. Causes and effects differ from one society to another and from one period to another, yet for all people, and particularly for women, physical mobility and social mobility are intimately connected. In some instances, the barriers preventing people from meeting their full potential as human beings include limited physical mobility in an increasingly mobile and dynamic world. In other instances, people are prevented from meeting their full potential as human beings because, even in developed societies, they lack the authority, rights, or status to take advantage of the existence of multiple forms of physical mobility present in their environments. Associations between physical and social mobility and the complexity of these relationships will shape our discussions over the coming few days. We acknowledge at the outset of this conference that mobility is a complex and, at times, fuzzy notion. In gen- eral we think of increasing social and physical mobil- ity as inherently complementary and inherently worthy objectives, but we must acknowledge that these notions are by no means universal. In addition to grappling with alternative notions of mobility and ways of measuring degrees of mobility, we must also confront the chal- lenge that some feminist scholars have recently posed in questioning whether some forms of satisfaction might be found in immobility. People are increasingly taking the position that environmental and financial sustainability may require limiting growth in mobility that others have seen as generally beneficial. The concept of mobility is inherently complex, and our task is further complicated by the fact that gender is also complex. There are physical biological differences between men and women, but we interpret those differ- ences differently depending on the specific time, place, and culture in which they are situated. Gender is far more about the social and cultural characteristics and roles that societies attach to men and women (and girls and boys) than it is about obvious sex-linked differences. Depending on the society in which one lives, the roles and expected appropriate behaviors of fathers differ from those of mothers, and expectations for daughters and sons are often dramatically different. of particular interest to us at this conference is that social and cultural definitions of gender-related roles interact with social and cultural definitions and expectations relating to mobility. We can be pretty sure that differences in the mobility and travel patterns of males and females result from socially defined gender roles. Increasingly, however, the picture is complicated by the growing realization that some inter- esting phenomena might have causalities in the opposite direction. That is, some of our gender-related social dif- ferences may well result from the ways in which physical mobility is experienced in particular societies.

43WoMen’S TRAvel ISSueS insights froM history In the 1830s, the first horse-drawn “omnibuses” were introduced into commercial service in France, and soon they were imitated in many world capitals and major cit- ies, including london; Stockholm, Sweden; new York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Boston, Massachusetts. From limited but persuasive documentation, we know that the responses were similar in many cities. Some richer people, who could afford the cost of daily com- muting, gradually moved their residences from the city centers toward the edges along routes served by these rudimentary public transport services. At the edges, they built and occupied larger homes on larger lots with gar- dens and separated their home environments from the noise, crowding, crime, and squalor of the central cit- ies, where industrial facilities burned coal and wood and stood near flammable wooden homes along streets in which common elements of the environment were horse manure and urine, flies, and carcasses of horses that had died in the course of their work, along with the rodents that bred in that environment (2). even in these early days, physical mobility was inti- mately related to social mobility, in that it brought dra- matic improvement in the quality of life for those who could afford it. With few urban women employed out- side of domestic service, early users of public transport were mostly males of the upper income classes. As long as transit fares exceeded the daily wage of most citizens, poorer working males, along with their families, had to remain in the central city to access employment by walking. The clientele for public transport consisted of males of the upper classes whose wives and children benefited by living in greener, cleaner, more spacious settings. This also contributed to the increasing physical separation of men and women according to their gender roles. Privileged men worked in the city where business predominated, while women carried out their economic and social duties in the home, which, in response to the availability of transit, was now increasingly located at some distance from the world of commerce. The sepa- ration of men’s and women’s realms extended to time as well as place. Although men constituted the vast majority of transit system users at the peak hours in the course of commuting to and from work, women and children used transit to a greater extent at off-peak periods for shopping and for social, medical, and other purposes. I do not mean to attribute the growing disparity in gender roles exclusively to the transportation system. Physical mobility played an enabling or facilitating role in these early times as well as more recently, and clearly, growing mobility enabled society to change more rapidly in directions for which there were many causal factors working simultaneously. This year [2009] marks the 100th anniversary of the first national conference on city planning in America, officially entitled “The First national Conference on City Planning and the Problem of Congestion,” which was held in Washington, D.C., during May 1909. The predominant themes of the conference—which remain uncomfortably familiar to us today—were urban crowd- ing, blight, the accommodation of large numbers of immi- grants to urban areas, urban environmental problems, and the shortage of affordable housing. The program of speakers at the conference reveals that the professions of public health, social work, civil engineering, and urban planning were all taking shape simultaneously and that the boundaries between them had not yet been as well defined as they later were to become. Among the speak- ers were the founding giants of these several fields. They included some of the great names in the founding of the field of planning, among them Daniel Burnham, Freder- ick law olmsted, and Benjamin Marsh, but also the Sur- geon General of the united States and the founders of the settlement house movement. President William Howard Taft was supposed to offer greetings in person but was unable to attend because he was ill (3). of particular interest to us here a century later is the talk given by the only woman to address the conference, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, founder and director of Greenwich House, a settlement house in lower Manhat- tan. Born into an upper-class family, she was an activ- ist renegade who married a radical Russian immigrant and chose to work for the improvement of conditions for recent immigrant communities. She spoke at the con- ference of the need to educate the populace everywhere of the need for urban planning and of the need to pro- vide affordable housing. She also directly linked physi- cal to social mobility. In her speech, Simkhovitch noted that new immigrants from foreign lands would have to struggle against disease or become criminals if they had to live in crowded, unsanitary, substandard conditions in lower Manhattan. She was well aware of the growing importance of elevated railways and the first elements of underground subways, and she urged that entire neigh- borhoods of new affordable housing be built in outlying areas of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. She advo- cated that the transportation system adopt a flat fare structure, so that the poor could travel longer distances for the same fare that they paid to travel shorter dis- tances. This would help to “deconcentrate” the city, and the lower densities at the edge would provide healthier environments in which she believed immigrant women and children could thrive. She was not the only advocate of this policy, of course, and it did become the dominant approach to pricing urban transportation in America’s largest cities (4). It is interesting to interpret Simkhovitch’s presentation in light of the century that has passed since she delivered

44 WoMen’S ISSueS In TRAnSPoRTATIon, voluMe 1 it. Giving high priority to environmental quality and tying the prospect for social mobility more explicitly to the qual- ity of the physical environment than we might today, she advocated that transportation policy be used to promote suburbanization and the lowering of urban densities. like many at that first American planning conference, she seemed to be accepting environmental determinism to a far greater degree than we would today. She believed that there was a strong causal relationship between the physi- cal environment in which a person dwelled and his or her access to social and economic opportunity. Because of her great commitment to reducing density and physical crowd- ing, she was—perhaps implicitly, and in keeping with her time—accepting greater geographic separation of men’s and women’s worlds into separate spheres, with women carrying out their family roles increasingly removed from the dense urban core. In just a few years, though, the employment of young women in urban industrial sweat shops would become a mainstay of economic growth for working-class women as well as men. Women increasingly became users of public transit networks in the 1920s and afterward. As entry into manual labor facilitated urban economic growth by exploiting lower- and middle-income women, it also gave these women a taste of economic activity outside the home and motivated many to seek further education and more rewarding employment. Along the way, women had to struggle to make public transit a safe, accepting environment in which to travel between their outlying homes and centrally located jobs. There are many, many accounts of verbal abuse and harassment, such as groping and pinching, of women as they increas- ingly used public transportation for access to work as well as nonwork services located in the central city. Gender roles were reasonably well defined with respect to personal transportation well before the arrival of the automobile. Women could certainly ride horses and drive wagons, but because of cultural norms that were widely shared, when they traveled independently or far from home, they stretched the boundaries of proper behavior. When women were in the company of men, it was understood that men would hold the reins, and families limited the mobility of their daughters (5). The coming of the automobile dramatically extended patterns already well established. Women did travel independently in cars in the early years, were among the earliest cross-country automobile adventurers, and were successful automobile racers. During roughly the same period, they became airplane pilots as well. Cultural norms struck back with force, however. Far fewer women than men became licensed to drive. Parents supervised the behavior of young women far more aggressively than that of young men when it came to automobile travel, because increased mobility certainly contributed to increased opportunities for sexual license and situations in which the use of alcohol and tobacco was beyond parental control. Household rules limited the mobility of wives and daughters, and in highly symbolic ways, rules were adopted in competitive automobile and air- craft racing to limit roles for women. The deeply harmful stereotype of the woman driver as indecisive, impetuous, and lacking in skill held an instrumental place in popu- lar culture for more than 70 years. Pseudoscientific evi- dence of questionable validity was used to promote and explain the rules and stereotypes. laughable by today’s standards, they were taken seriously and used aggres- sively to limit women’s freedom of motion, thereby limit- ing women’s social as well as physical mobility (6). taking stock: research accoMPlishMents and needs Review of the proceedings of the three previous inter- national conferences and the papers submitted to this conference, along with review of the published literature on gender and transportation, reveals some unambigu- ous patterns that show where understanding of gender and mobility has advanced since intellectual attention was first focused on the subject. Also revealed are themes and topics about which enormous gaps remain in knowledge of gender in relation to transportation. This is not surprising, given that this is only the fourth—not the 40th—international conference on this subject. Both accomplishments and challenges are worthy of summary here at the beginning of the conference. The purpose in pointing to gaps in our collective knowledge is not intended to be critical of the excellent and informative work that has been done. It is intended to spur discussion that hopefully can lead to some consensus on research needs and opportunities, which is one of the most impor- tant purposes of our gathering. Perhaps this also can motivate some to undertake work to fill in those gaps. In part because of professional norms of the research community that define some questions as more appropri- ate to analyze than others, and in part because the results of studies are most credible when based on quantitative analysis using authoritative data series, we invariably ask similar questions over and over again, looking ever more intently at a narrow subset of issues. We behave like the person searching at night for a lost set of keys only in the area lighted by the street lamp. Public policy must be made, however, with respect to a very broad set of concerns, whether or not these concerns are readily amenable to systematic quantitative analysis. Although as knowledge is refined, it tends to develop an increasingly narrow focus, governments con- tinually make judgments about policies on the basis of broad sets of concerns that are often not well addressed by research.

45WoMen’S TRAvel ISSueS As the subject matter of gender and transportation has developed deeper and more refined pictures of travel and related traffic safety patterns of men and women in the most economically developed urban areas using more deeply focused data analyses, we have also started to recognize concerns that have not been nearly as well addressed by the existing literature. These include many important questions that remain largely unanswered. The issues encompass the following: • Gender differences in travel patterns, • Traffic safety and gender, • Gender and travel in poorer societies and countries undergoing rapid development, • The historical evolution of relationships between gender and transportation, • Gender and mobility in rural areas, • Employment and advancement within the trans- portation industry, • Information technology and electronic connectiv- ity, and • The need for broad syntheses that link different thematic areas. Gender Differences in Travel Patterns We have learned a great deal during recent decades about gender differences in travel patterns in developed urban societies. Comparative quantitative social science analy- sis of travel by men, women, children, and families in urban areas of developed, economically advanced soci- eties has advanced greatly since the first conference was held three decades ago. national and regional databases and specialized local studies relying on travel diaries, standardized surveys, and the collection of administrative data in the course of the operation of our transportation systems have yielded large numbers of purposeful studies of ways in which mobility is affected by gender. We can state some fairly strong generalizations that hold across metropolitan areas and even across national boundaries and that seem more persistent over many decades than we might have predicted they would be. literally hundreds of studies in many locations make it clear that women’s travel patterns typically are more compact than men’s. The spatial range of women’s travel is shorter even when and where women make more total trips than men. For a variety of reasons, women’s travel is more likely than men’s to be proximate to home, and this reflects gender roles. Data on travel by trip purpose reveal that women do more of their household’s shop- ping than men and make trips in support of others (from children to the elderly) to schools, doctor’s offices, the homes of relatives, and the location of supportive ser- vices of many types. Additionally, as women in economically advanced societies also increase their participation in the paid labor force, including professional, technical, and specialized work, their work trips, while lengthening over time, are characteristically on average shorter than those of men. This is presumably because they spatially limit their employment choices in reflection of their more common responsibilities for supportive roles within households. Whether employed by others or owning their own busi- nesses, women are more likely to work at home or closer to home than men, are less likely to hold jobs that require visiting a wide variety of sites in the course of the work week, and are less likely than men to engage in overnight travel in the course of their work. Closely related to these findings are those that tell us women are more likely than men to use public transit for work- and non-work-related trips and to use carpools and vanpools, and that they are less likely than men to drive alone to work. Although these patterns are repeated in many set- tings and at many points in time, there is a great deal of variation in these observed patterns, as is typical with most generalizations about human behavior, and many exceptions and anomalies are to be found in the data. In a recent paper, conference chair Susan Hanson asserts the importance of concentrating on some of the outli- ers or anomalies in these well-known patterns, arguing that important new insights are to be gained by focusing on unexpected outcomes and deviations from expecta- tions than by reviewing data or studies that reconfirm them (7). There are, for example, some differences from the dominant patterns that appear to be associated with particular ethnic communities, and in a few geographic settings, some data sets reveal other inconsistencies with respect to the expected patterns. on the basis of a smaller number of studies, earlier conferences and the accumulated published literature also demonstrate that women are more likely than men to be more concerned about security while traveling. While there are data that help us understand the association between gender and security, as exemplified by the plenary paper for this conference by Anastasia loukaitou-Sideris, such data are most available for urban surface transportation. The data show that women are more likely than men to be victimized and hence to be concerned about security when traveling with respect to robbery, purse snatching, assault, sexual battery, verbal harassment, leering, and petty annoyances. Concerns for security combine with actual victimization to limit free and unfettered move- ment of women in urban settings (8). Traffic Safety and Gender Although we have learned more about traffic safety and gender, knowledge has not advanced nearly as much as

46 WoMen’S ISSueS In TRAnSPoRTATIon, voluMe 1 has knowledge about travel patterns and choices. There also are some increasingly well-understood relationships between traffic safety, crash rates, injuries, deaths, and gender. We now rather broadly accept the generalization that taking into consideration important contextual vari- ations such as age, education level, and cultural setting, males are more likely than females to engage in risky behavior such as driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, exceeding the speed limit, violating traffic laws, or driving without seat belts. The propensity for males to engage in riskier behavior may also extend to motorcycle use, bicycling, and pedestrian behavior. It also appears, with less certainty, that in a crash of particular severity and characteristics, after control- ling for a wide variety of contextual variables, women may be more prone to injury or to more serious injury than men. This may be because the design of vehicles and restraint systems has been influenced by the physical characteristics of men to a greater extent than those of women. Research has started to explore such issues, but it remains exploratory, and deeper analysis is needed. Interactions between aging, gender, and traffic safety are important, in that women in many places have longer life expectancy than men. In many societies, we are today experiencing the first generation of elderly women who have been drivers throughout their lives. This is a subject about which we have learned a great deal from research done by some present at this conference, yet there remain deep, interesting, and researchable questions. In this area as in some others, we have the collective sense that we have only barely scratched the surface and that opportu- nities abound for deeper analysis and new insights (9). Gender and Travel in Poorer Societies and Countries Undergoing Rapid Development There has been far more analysis of gender issues with respect to travel, traffic, safety, and security in advanced, developed economies than in poorer societies and countries undergoing rapid development. The rates of change in economic status, mobility, and relationships between men and women are greatest outside of north America and Western europe. In many ways, the most pressing current policy problems and the greatest opportunities for the advancement of knowl- edge about relationships between gender and transportation are to be found in latin America, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle east. There remain many places in the world in which women’s physical mobility is formally circumscribed by social conventions associated with their society’s intent to limit their social mobility. not so coincidentally, there are some, although certainly fewer, places in which revolutionary social movements are attempting to transform social mobil- ity by attacking issues related to physical mobility. Because few databases exist in these places as the basis for formal sta- tistical studies, we must rely more heavily in these contexts upon case studies, participant observation, one-of-a-kind surveys employing small samples, and weaker evidence such as news media accounts of situations and challenges to the status quo. The conference planning committee, recognizing the significance of problems in the developing world and of changes occurring there, was pleased to invite and to gain the participation of Professor Ananya Roy, whose research on these issues will be presented shortly at this session. It is hoped that her talk and the proceedings of this conference will contribute to a genuine “internationalization” of future investigations of gender and travel (10). Historical Evolution of Relationships Between Gender and Transportation Despite some historical analysis of women, men, and travel, understandings of the historical evolution of rela- tionships between gender and transportation remain rudimentary. There has been modest, gradual growth in our understanding of the history of gender issues in trans- portation, especially in the richest and most advanced societies. While historical research using primary source material is much rarer than social science research based on current data, the historical work that has been done has resulted in increased comprehension of the evolution of differences in male and female travel, mode choice, safety, and security over a period of many decades lead- ing to the present. We know more than we did just a few decades ago about differences in the mobility of men and women as modern cities formed. We know more about how patterns of mobility responded when transporta- tion modes and technologies, including public transit and automobiles, were newly adopted and were playing important roles in the development of urban spatial pat- terns. Many of the published accounts of the historical evolution of gender issues in mobility are repetitions of already published work, however, and there is limited original scholarly work on this theme. Beyond the direct study of historical events using pri- mary sources, scholars have barely scratched the surface of opportunities to examine relationships between gender and mobility as revealed in popular culture. In the early 20th century, for example, trains, cars, and trips featured promi- nently in pulp magazine fiction, romance novels, and early radio dramas. The content of these media presentations is rich in symbolism and is ripe for interpretation about the social implications of physical mobility. We have learned that there are indeed many adven- turers and folk heroes to be found among women who strongly influenced the early history of travel as race-car drivers, pioneers of long-distance driving adventure, and even as barnstorming pilots in the early days of aviation. We also know that history tells us a great deal about

47WoMen’S TRAvel ISSueS the interaction between gender, mobility, race, and eth- nicity. uncovering the layers of history, we learn that some of the folk heroes linking gender and mobility were people from racial and ethnic minority groups and from communities having lower economic status. We know that efforts to create more ideal communi- ties at different times in our history responded to explicit notions of appropriate gender roles and that these encap- sulated concepts of gender, mobility, spatial separation, and access (11). In turn, these ideas were, though often clumsily, reflected in policies that actually were adopted and that gave rise to particular urban forms. There remain enormous gaps in historical research relating to gender and mobility outside of the most advanced Western countries, and there are opportunities to contribute through comparative and cross-cultural historical analysis. even within advanced industrial societies that have been the subject of extensive analy- sis, histories are still to be written of women’s roles and gender-related issues that have unfolded over more than a century within the transportation industry and within the many institutions that constitute the environments within which we do our work. Gender and Mobility in Rural Areas even within advanced urban societies, our knowledge has improved unevenly, and there remains much to learn about gender and mobility in rural areas and with respect to long-distance (intercity) travel, non-work-related travel, and air travel. Research presented at previous conferences in this series and to be presented at this one makes it clear that we have studied gender issues mostly in relation to urban travel, daily commuting, and routine, repetitive family travel such as trips to school, shopping trips, and trips related to family business. even within well-studied, data-rich societies such as the united States and Western europe, we have devoted far less attention to relation- ships between gender and transportation in rural areas, small towns, and unique cultural settings ranging broadly from Indian reservations to retirement communities. Simi- larly, there are far fewer published works about the gen- der dimensions of nonwork travel, such as recreational and vacation travel, and long-distance, international, and air travel related to work and professional activities as well as to leisure and family activities. Much remains to be learned from future studies on these topics. Employment and Advancement Within the Transportation Industry Insufficient attention has been given to gender issues associated with employment and advancement within the transportation industry (passenger and goods trans- port) and with respect to the roles of transportation employees and professionals. Travel and transportation make up a substantial proportion of economic activity in modern economies, and very large numbers of peo- ple are engaged in providing transportation services as well as in using them. economic and social mobility in many societies has been facilitated by employment in the transportation industry. It is well known, for example, that in the united States and europe, women became bus and truck drivers during the Second World War and that, more recently, bus, train, aircraft, and freight operations have been an important entry point into the middle class for ethnic minority and immigrant com- munities. Yet much less scholarship has been devoted to the study of the implications for men and women of shifts in employment patterns in transportation, includ- ing such important issues as trends in unionization, rates of advancement, differences in salaries and wages by gender, gender differences in full-time versus part-time employment, access to fringe and retirement benefits, and implications for men and women of the contracting out of transportation operations. Information Technology and Electronic Connectivity Information technology and electronic connectivity are already transforming the relationship between gender and mobility, and the present and future of that change are in need of systematic research and analysis. The global revolution in information technology has pro- foundly affected the field of transportation. Two decades ago, most people believed that improved worldwide elec- tronic access would substitute for physical access. Today we realize that in most advanced technological societies, electronic and physical access are complementary. They work together to enable us to maintain business and per- sonal relationships over longer distances and to do so asynchronously. As we did with the telephone genera- tions earlier, we may substitute some electronic exchanges for trips, but ultimately, we tend to travel more because electronic connectivity encourages us to build more dis- persed commercial and personal networks. Just as pub- lic transit, the automobile, and the telephone interacted with one another and with gender in related but distinct ways, it is reasonable to expect that the increasing inte- gration of information with mobility—especially in soci- eties changing most rapidly—will affect men and women differently. In some ways, such technological advances reduce differences, while in other ways they enhance dif- ferences between social, economic, and family roles that we closely associate with gender. The importance of this type of research may not have been clear when the first

48 WoMen’S ISSueS In TRAnSPoRTATIon, voluMe 1 international conference was held, but it should today be an obvious dimension of our curiosity about gender roles in relation to travel and transportation. Need for Broad Syntheses While there have been many insightful and informative studies of gender issues related to travel patterns and traffic safety, as well as some interesting historical studies, there have been few broad syntheses linking these different the- matic areas. even fewer studies have integrated social science analysis with broader theories of social change and gender in society. The body of scholarship dealing with women, travel, and transportation issues is growing in breadth and in depth, however. Characteristic of many themes in the scholarly literature that are of relatively recent origin, the work is promising but still fragmented. Advances made by social scientists and historians, for example, intersect with one another only occasionally. Scholarly analysis in the context of rapidly changing countries overseas is not well integrated with insights (reflecting both similarities and differences) from the findings of studies carried out in America and Western europe. Innovations in policy take place from time to time, and government agencies and pri- vate companies also take initiatives with respect to services and employment policies. often policy and program inno- vations are only loosely informed by or based on scholarly findings. These initiatives rarely are systematically evalu- ated, and opportunities to learn from experiments in the real world are more often lost to the research community than they are taken advantage of. Still very much needed are syntheses, comparative studies, and cross-disciplinary studies that compare, contrast, interpret, and integrate the findings of researchers whose individual works reflect the particular perspectives and methods associated with their disciplines. conclusion As we begin the fourth international conference on women’s issues in transportation, we can be aware of some important differences between this and earlier conferences. It is hoped that today there is less need to assert that the issues bringing us together are legitimate or meaningful ones for transportation scholars and prac- titioners. People today ask far less frequently why there is a conference on women’s issues and whether there are important issues to be addressed at such a conference. The theme of the conference is not quite yet to be found in the mainstream of either transportation or gender scholar- ship, however, and the questions being asked today are, if anything, more challenging—because they are both more complex and more subtle—than those asked in the 1970s. There is today growing opportunity to think in more integrative and cumulative ways about our subject matter. We note the maturation of this field of inquiry by reference to many more completed studies and stronger consensus on the meanings of the conclusions reached on the basis of studies that have come earlier. It would be fair to say that on the basis of earlier conferences and the wider literature they have helped to create, the scholarly questions about relationships between gender and transportation posed today are far more insightful than those posed at the first of the conferences. Although the questions are becoming more sophisticated, there remains doubt that we have arrived at authoritative conclusions, robust interpretations, or the ability to meaningfully link policy initiatives with research. Some of the questions to be addressed at this conference are the same as at the first one, but they are posed with deeper insight and sophistication because of the many threads of insight that have come from work done in the interim. new questions also are being con- sidered, and these reflect the gradual growth of partici- pation in these conferences as well as insights from new scholarly analysis and recent initiatives in programs and policies. As we embark on the fourth conference, I am keenly aware of the important contributions of those who par- ticipated in the earlier conferences and of those who raised gender issues in transportation to a much higher profile than these issues have previously had in the evolu- tion of our field. 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