It is well established in the literature that women commute shorter than men, which have shown to be one of the reasons for the residual gender income gap. A general observation is that the stronger gender equality in society, the smaller the gap between men's and women's commuting distance. Yet, the gender gap in commuting distance prevails to this day – even in Sweden, which is one of the most gender equal societies in the world. Even if there exist hypotheses related to women being more likely to have caregiving responsibilities and to work in less specialized jobs, there is no consensus in the literature on why these gender differences arise or how they change over time. In this paper we therefore investigate why women commute shorter than men and whether the gender gap in commuting distance, including its causes, has changed over the 21st century.

We use panel data of the full population in Mälardalen (from Statistics Sweden), including their location of residence, commuting distance, job sector, presence of children, and accessibility to the labor market. We separate the sample into singles and coupled workers and match this data to historical transport systems from 1998, 2005, and 2017 (from the Swedish transport administration). From this we construct a labor market accessibility index facing all individuals by car and public transport. We regress commuting distance on this index and various sets of explanatory variables such as job sector, education, and presence of children in order to test a set of hypotheses about why women commute shorter distances than men.