Gender Patterns of Human Mobility in Colombia: Reexamining Ravenstein’s Laws of Migration

Abstract

0000−0002−7071−379X] , Laura Lotero 2[0000−0002−6537−3276] , Alessio Cardillo 3,4,5[0000−0003−4811−9978] , Hugo Barbosa 1[0000−0002−3927−969X] , and Ronaldo Menezes 1[0000−0002−6479−6429]Abstract. Public stakeholders implement several policies and regulations to tackle gender gaps, fostering the change in the cultural constructs associated with gender. One way to quantify if such changes elicit gender equality is by studying mobility. In this work, we study the daily mobility patterns of women and men occurring in Medellín (Colombia) in two years: 2005 and 2017. Specifically, we focus on the spatiotemporal differences in the travels and find that purpose of travel and occupation characterise each gender differently. We show that women tend to make shorter trips, corroborating Ravenstein's Laws of Migration. Our results indicate that urban mobility in Colombia seems to behave in agreement with the "archetypal" case studied by Ravenstein.

Differences in the spatial landscape of urban mobility: gender and socioeconomic perspectives

“…It is worth mentioning that although in our dataset women are more likely to perform more short travels than men (see Figure S9 and Tables S4 and S5 of the Supplementary Material) 21,33 , the lower values of H W do not stem from the preference of women to remain within the same zone (see Table S6 of the Supplementary Material). Moreover, our sample does not show a high difference in the percentages of men and women living and working in the same zone (see Table S6 of the Supplementary Material).…”

“…Thus, of all the sociodemographic dimensions known to influence human travelling behaviours, in this work, we concentrate on the interaction between gender and the socioeconomic characteristics of travellers and their mobility patterns. We argue that previously-observed socioeconomic differences in urban mobility 14,15,17,21 could be connected with how different groups concentrate/distribute their travels throughout the urban area. Our goal, therefore, is to quantify how concentrated/dispersed the travelling behaviours of different segments of a population are.…”

“…Men and women display different patterns in mobility such as average travel time, preferences on the mode of transportation, and commuting travel distance 17,18,20,21,[30][31][32] . Here, we analyse whether mobility diversity is a suitable candidate to grasp differences in mobility in a gender-centred manner.…”

“…Even though safety is a problem faced by all genders, empirical evidences indicate that when possible, women are more likely to opt for longer (or more costly) journeys in favour of a trip perceived as safer [17][18][19][20] . Nevertheless, in general, women are more likely to make shorter trips than men 21 . Furthermore, women with care duties are more likely to work at locations having shorter commuting travel time, leading them to display different patterns of mobility when compared with men [22][23][24] .…”

A Mobility Model for Return and Repeated Migration Based on Network Motifs

“…These include, for example, data from social media (25), card transactions (26), mobile phone data (27; 28; 29), and others (30; 31; 32). These studies have shown, for example, that women tend to make shorter trips (33) and visit less diverse places than men (34). Using mobile phone call records and manual data collection, researchers analysed daily trip patterns to classify individuals as explorers and returners (30), and showed that daily trips can be described by a limited number of network patterns (35).…”