Women's mobility networks enable more efficient travel

TL;DR

This study models gendered mobility as networks, revealing women’s travel is more clustered and home-anchored, leading to higher efficiency despite seemingly less diverse movement.

Contribution

It introduces a network-based approach to resolve conflicting views on women's mobility diversity and demonstrates increased travel efficiency for women.

Findings

Women’s mobility networks are more clustered and home-anchored.

Women link multiple destinations within single trips, increasing efficiency.

Travel efficiency is higher for women due to destination chaining.

Abstract

Our understanding of gender differences in mobility is marked by a clear tension: surveys portray women's movements as more complex than men's, while digital traces suggest less diverse travel. Here, we resolve the contradiction by modeling trajectories as networks of sequential visits, using smartphone traces linked to self-reported gender for 543,155 individuals across 10 countries. We show that the apparent conflict in the literature arises because women's mobility networks are simultaneously more clustered and more home-anchored -- a nuance obscured by aggregate metrics. This pattern arises because women tend to link multiple destinations within single trips, for trips spanning up to 150 km and multiple days. This organization yields systematically higher travel efficiency, measured as distance saved through destination chaining over monthly sequences.