Costs and benefits of gender policies in transportation. State of the art of quantitative approaches

Abstract

The transport sector has been a pioneer in the quantification and even monetization of complex issues, such as the value of life or the value of time. Gender issues are more and more in the core of many policies, but its analysis is usually qualitative at most. The objective of this paper is to review current quantitative approaches, and highlight their advantages, their drawbacks and their gaps. The transport sector can be analysed with a gender perspective, either considering its workers or its users. In both cases, men and women show different attitudes and behaviours. To begin with, workforce in transport is predominantly male, while public transportation is used mostly by women. There are numerous studies with a gender perspective in the transport sector. Most are qualitative and simply describe the problem or the project in question. More and more are using quantitative approaches, but mostly for describing interventions, not for assessing impacts. In many respects, such as gender violence, there have been notable advances, despite methodological difficulties. In others, almost nothing can be found. In any case, evaluations are far from systematic and important gaps remain. The large experience of the transport sector when dealing with intangible impacts should facilitate the development of quantitative assessments and evaluations, but the lack of quantitative ex-post analyses makes it difficult to assess gender-oriented projects.