‘Commuting Is Bad’—Particularly for Women

A growing body of research shows how longer travel times affect moms’ ability to work.

For all of the professional gains women have made over the past several decades, one stubborn measure of inequality—the gender wage gap—has been especially difficult to stamp out. And it’s a disparity that can be traced in large part to parenthood. In nearly every country on Earth, the arrival of children tends to coincide with a lasting drop in employment and earnings for moms but not dads. Conversations about how to better support working mothers typically focus on family policy, such as subsidized child care and paid parental leave. But one significant factor affecting moms’ employment remains under-discussed: the commute.

This is, admittedly, not a terribly sexy topic. But a growing body of research suggests that whether a mom can hang on to her job comes down to how long it takes her to get there. Notably, the crucial role that travel time plays in shaping maternal employment has been identified not only in the United States but also in countries with far more robust family policies and social safety nets. Commutes also affect women up and down the socioeconomic scale (though in different ways).

The negative influence of the commute is so pronounced that it’s hard to imagine making the economy work for moms without acknowledging its impact. And the solution to the commute penalty may be as daunting as it is simple: To help moms work outside the home, society needs to make it easier for them to work near home.

The commute is, to a great extent, a modern phenomenon. But mobility constraints have been governing the kind of work that women undertake for a long time. Roughly half a century ago, the anthropologist Judith K. Brown observed that throughout history, women gravitated toward jobs with characteristics that made them compatible with child care: They tended not to require “rapt concentration,” were relatively repetitive and easy to interrupt and resume, and didn’t require the woman to stray terribly far from home. In postindustrial societies, many of the requirements Brown cited for making work compatible with child-rearing have become less relevant; women work in all sorts of industries requiring focused concentration, for example. But distance from home—which of course affects commute time—may play a larger role in employment-based gender inequality than ever, as other factors, such as gaps in education between men and women, have declined in significance.

The study that seems to have kicked off much of the research on commutes was published about a decade ago. It found that in U.S. cities with longer average commute times, married women’s workforce-participation rates tended to be lower. A couple of years ago, researchers attempted to replicate the finding with more detailed data, drawn from 272 cities across the country, and found that it held up: A 10-minute increase in average commute time decreases by 4.4 percentage points the probability that married women in the area work. The effect was driven pretty much entirely by moms, rose with the number of children they had, and was bigger for those with younger children. “I think it’s very strong evidence that commuting is bad,” Jordi Jofre-Monseny, a co-author of the study, told me, “but particularly for women.”

Read: Why parents struggle so much in the world’s richest country

Even when commuting doesn’t push moms to leave the workforce entirely, it can shape the sorts of jobs they take. One recently published working paper used an unusually rich data set to document the career moves that people make before and after becoming parents. It found that before parenthood, men and women both tend to make steady progress in their career, moving to better-paying companies and to higher-paying jobs within those companies. But after children enter the picture, moms (not dads) start shifting to jobs at lower-paying employers, or to entirely different industries; for instance, moms may move out of finance into health care or education. Mothers seem to be trading lower pay for flexibility or other accommodations, Brenden Timpe, an economics professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and a co-author of the paper, told me. He and his colleagues found that many moms moving to lower-paying employers were opting for jobs with part-time hours, more opportunities for remote work—and shorter commutes.

These findings are not unique to the United States. A 2022 study of data from Belgium found that, as in many other countries, a substantial employment gap opens between men and women after parenthood—largely because moms are so much more likely than dads to leave jobs outside their local area. A study this year, using data from Norway, found that after having a child, mothers reduce their commute time considerably more than fathers do, leaving them with fewer and lower-quality job opportunities. And a paper last year, looking at Germany, found that women’s willingness to sacrifice wages for a shorter commute jumps by 130 percent after they have a child and does not start to decline again until the child reaches age 12.

Collectively, these studies suggest that commuting is a hindrance to employment for moms regardless of their socioeconomic status, but that the manner in which they downshift their career varies. One paper, published in June, found that mothers without a college degree are much more likely than college-educated moms to leave the workforce on account of a long commute. Timpe’s paper, meanwhile, observed that among those moms who remained in the workforce but switched to lower-paying jobs (for benefits such as a shorter commute), the highest-paid took the largest hit. “If you think about people working at, you know, Goldman Sachs, that’s really where you see the biggest drops,” Timpe said. And of course, some moms don’t have the option of leaving the labor market: Another paper found that although commute distance widens the gender wage gap among all moms, the effect is a bit smaller among single moms, who likely have no choice but to carry on working, regardless of how terrible traffic is.

It’s worth spelling out why commuting is such a headache for parents. For one, the longer your commute, the more child care you are likely to need and the less time you get to spend with your kids. But many of the researchers I spoke with for this article believed that the draw of a short commute has less to do with the time people might save in a typical day and more to do with their ability to reliably show up for their kids.

Read: The remote work–fertility connection

Getting to day care or school pickup on time is an essential part of the parenting gig; long commutes heighten the risk of something, whether traffic or a train delay, causing a holdup. Even if a child doesn’t need their parent for midday errands or emergencies every day, on any day, they might need a parent: Kids get sick, have a doctor appointment, forget their lunch box, or have an assembly or other event that calls for parents’ presence. “All these activities take time, and they might be increasingly difficult to perform in a situation where just going back and forth from work requires you 45 minutes or one hour,” Ilaria D’Angelis, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a co-author of the June paper, told me. And although the need to reach a child quickly may come up relatively infrequently, Timpe said, “You kind of have to make a huge employment decision based on that.” One parent may end up adjusting or limiting their work to ensure they can stay in proximity to their kids—and statistically speaking, it’s usually the mom.

The long-commute phenomenon might be made less punitive for women if more men were to modify their career to stick close to the kids. But that doesn’t so much solve the problem as redistribute it; if more dads were to take the hit, the commute burden would simply shift to them, rather than helping more parents, whether moms or dads, work higher-paying jobs. One potential fix: Employers could offer flexible hours, or reduce the career-hampering effect of commutes by allowing more employees to work from home. Such flexibility is probably one reason that commuting is less likely to push highly educated women out of the labor market, D’Angelis said; such women generally have a better chance of finding work that can be done remotely. For those without the ability to work from home, efforts to reduce congestion or invest in faster and more reliable public transportation—worthy goals, though much harder to attain—would almost certainly help.

Read: Cities aren’t built for kids

Yet another option would be to find ways to enable people to live closer to where they work. One recent study, examining how the commute penalty is linked to the spatial distribution of jobs, found something that is going to sound blindingly obvious but that is worth teasing out: A mom’s preference for a short commute penalizes her only when acting on it means sacrificing a higher-wage opportunity. Consider the finance industry, in which the good jobs are typically concentrated in city centers. Sitian Liu, an economics professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, told me that among financial workers living in U.S. city centers, one doesn’t see much of a gender wage gap or a commute penalty. That makes sense because if you live in the financial district, the need or desire for a short commute has little bearing on women’s ability to access high-paying jobs. Only among finance workers in the suburbs does a large gender commuting gap—and a resulting gender wage gap—emerge.

But things look different in other high-skill, high-paying industries, such as medicine. Balancing work and parenthood as a physician, for instance, is no easy feat, no matter one’s distance from the workplace. Because hospitals and doctors’ offices are more geographically distributed, however, female doctors are less likely than finance workers to be penalized for living in the suburbs, Liu explained; those who decide to live outside the city still have access to high-paying, nearby jobs. Together, these findings point to two ways to minimize the commute penalty: Make it easier for more moms to live closer to existing job hubs—perhaps by building more family-friendly housing in urban centers—or spread the jobs out.

Motherhood will likely always shape women’s involvement in the economy. But the commute-penalty research demonstrates that moms’ ability to work depends greatly on practical, often malleable, aspects of how that work fits into their daily life. When mothers are “in a situation where they can really reconcile their family life with their work life,” D’Angelis said, “they do that.” The task for a society intent on reducing gender pay inequality is to create the conditions where that type of reconciliation is possible.