Gender aspects on transports - literature

The publication reports about two tasks that SKL (Swedish Association of Local Authorities) commissioned FOI to carry out during the autumn of 2011. One was to do a literature review in the area of gender and transportation with the aim of understanding women's and men's transportation patterns and contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and to give examples of how municipalities and county councils can work to lessen those differences. The other task was to analyze data about women's and men's car ownership and car use, data that were delivered to FOI by SCB (Statistics Sweden) thorough SKL The literature review showed that women´s and men´s travel differently, both in Sweden and in other countries. The differences are in short that men travel longer and more often with cars than women do, while women travel more often on public transport and that more often travel with multiple purposes. These differences can partly be explained by the gendered division of work that takes place in households with children but it is more difficult to explain the differences in single households without any children. When the energy use for single women's and men's transportation patterns is calculated, it differs significantly, mostly because single men buy much more fuel than women do. Examples of how municipalities can work in order to enhance gender equality are to ensure an equal distribution of power in the transportation sector and to investigate consequences of proposals for women's and men's economy and amount of unpaid work. It is about twice as common for a man to own a car than for women in Sweden. Cars registered on men travel longer than cars registered on women and the energy use (in kWh per km) is somewhat lower for women's cars. These three facts means that the total energy use for travels by cars owned by men in Sweden is more than twice as high as for cars owned by women. In all counties it is more common for women to own an environmentally friendly car and women also buy such cars more often than men do.