Over the years at TreeHugger we've written about possible reasons that the cycling gap between genders exists, and why it is so difficult to close. Already some years ago we wrote about author Elly Blue's theory that women's lower earning power and larger chunk of household duties made it harder for them to bike.
Turns out, Blue's theory - at least the part about women having more household duties - is bolstered with some data.
A study from UCLA's Kelcie Ralph and Michael Smart shows that U.S. women's lives – at least, straight women's lives – are more filled with domestic chores and duties. Huff and Ralph studied non-commute travel in households - they used data between 2003 and 2012 from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for their findings. ATUS respondents kept detailed diaries of their travel over a single day, allowing the researchers to see what tradeoffs household members make to go places and do things.
Smart and Ralph's report documented that even when U.S. straight women earn more, are better educated, and work more hours than their male counterparts, they still make more 'child-serving' trips and more slogs to the grocery!
They found that: "straight women do the the most household-serving labor and related travel, and straight men the least."
Read more: http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/why-women-dont-bike-blame-it-housework.html
