An economist has highlighted the discovery of a “reverse gender gap” when it comes to workers’ commuting times. He has also declared April 14 to be “Equal Commute Day.”
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Mark J. Perry, professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan at Flint and economics scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), explains in a blog for AEI that figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show the difference in average commute times in the United States. When broken out by gender, the commute time is 61 minutes for women and 79 minutes for men.
He then flips the gender pay gap explanation, citing that while the average American full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man, “the average full-time working woman commutes only 77 minutes for every 100 minutes a man commutes to work,” according to the blog.
To see the calculations Perry used to determine that April 14 was the date of Equal Commute Day, see the blog.
Perry also cited OECD figures to show another aspect of the “gender commute gap”—that having children slightly increases the commuting times on average for men but reduces the time for women. Times vary, of course, by the age of the child(ren).
He said he initiated Equal Commute Day in the same spirit of his 2010 introduction of “Equal Occupational Fatality Day,” which showed while men had jobs that paid more, they also worked disproportionately in occupations with a much higher risk of injury and death on the job. He used Bureau of Labor Statistics figures to ascertain that in the “gender occupational fatality gap,” males suffer 92% of occupational fatalities to 8% of workplace deaths for females.
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