Season 2 Episode 31: Talking Transport Transformation – Podcast (podigee.io)
Where do care and mobility intersect? Inés Sánchez de Madariaga, a leading expert in gender and urban planning, shares her insights on integrating the mobility of care into transportation planning and policy.
In this article, we take a closer look at the mobility of care as an analytical category that highlights trips made for caregiving in transport planning. With her work, Inés counteracts a male bias in mobility data and uncovers the true travel patterns of women around the world. She explains how to bring this concept into urban transportation systems to create more inclusive and equitable cities.
Asking the right questions
The mobility of care is an umbrella category that Inés developed over 15 years ago while working on a research project for the Spanish Ministry of Transport. She found gender biases and omissions in the categorization of travel purposes – a system commonly used in transportation agencies around the world to show whether trips happen for employment, education, shopping, leisure, or strolling. “This way of categorizing is gender-biased”, she explains. Since care means the tasks carried out by adult persons for the upkeep of the home and the caring of others, the related trips often count as “shopping, strolling, visiting, or escorting”.
The revolutionary element of the mobility of care category is that this term makes it possible to separate the trips motivated by care purposes from trips that are related to employment, personal, or leisure purposes. “You need to set the questions right”, says Inés, emphasizing the importance of briefing both the interviewers and the interviewees to really get reliable data in transport purpose surveys. She has designed questionnaires for research on women and transportation in cities as diverse as Madrid, Nairobi, Buenos Aires, and the Washington Transit Metropolitan Area Transit Area. In the latter, artificial intelligence allowed data mining from the transit cards. Data from cell phones can also support data, but “each set of data has its own biases and limitations”, Inés reminds us.
Disaggregating data by gender
The cultural context matters a lot when collecting data on travel purposes. For example, older women in more traditional cultures see care as an act of love, rather than an obligation or a duty. In other cultures, men might be taking on an increasing amount of the care work and maybe categorize it as an obligation rather than part of their leisure or shopping travel. Inés recommends working with gender indicators: “It measures an activity that leads to gender tasks independently of whether it’s men or women who perform it. Gender-disaggregated data show us the empirical evidence of how travel behaviors and needs are very different between men and women.”
Reflecting different realities
The next question is how transport planners and politicians can implement the lessons from data about the mobility of care. Often, this is closely linked to the economic situation in a country. “If we develop policies that make these trips easier, we are benefiting women in particular”, Inés says. This is an important opportunity to reduce inequalities.
Already, there are many ideas around the world for making care-related trips easier and more equal, ranging from fair pricing to increasing amenities and safety of train stations or bus and subway stops, the participation of women in the transportation labor force, and improving the regularity and reliability of travel services. Connections between peripheral residential areas are also key, since most systems connect to places of work.
Governments in Mexico City, in Bogotá and in Indian cities have started to include the mobility of care into their transportation legislation. Inés is hoping that her concept will attract even more attention, which will also allow it to be adapted to different contexts. “We need to be careful with words to reflect the different realities of people who do care trips, and we need more research into these realities”, she summarizes.