Improving female participation in shared mobility

Improving female participation in shared mobility

By Simon Wilson, Chief Scientific Officer, GTS

It is well known that women are less likely to participate in car sharing than men. The question then is whether there are methods to encourage higher participation of women. This blog will look at this question, specifically examining the research and data related to public car sharing services, rather than other cases such as peer-to-peer.

There is a lot of focus on helping car share organisations to set appropriate targets for parameters like car locations and expected utilisation.  However, a deeper understanding of why people participate, or don’t participate in car sharing schemes is required to identify potential barriers to entry. Without that understanding, the benefits of car sharing could end up favouring certain groups and increase the gender and sociodemographic gap in mobility. In particular, it is important to understand the factors influencing women’s car sharing behaviour, because the design of current services may favour the needs and perspectives of men.

The most common reasons women use car sharing services haven been identified as shopping, leisure or transporting children or others to activities or appointments.  In general, women use vehicles to travel shorter distances more frequently than men and use cars for a wider variety of journey types. On that basis they should be using car sharing a lot, which favours such a style of usage. Certainly in European markets, there is good evidence that socio-demographic factors play an important role in car share use, and specifically there are significant differences between men and women’s use.

 

Several studies have identified the following factors as important in driving car share use differently between men and women:

• One study has focussed on how women view these services and identified 2 types of motivating factors. The first are business platform motivations such as gaining a market advantage, utility and trust in the service to deliver.  The second set of motivations are personal, such as perceptions of value for money, fashion and hedonism (placing the value of experiences over physical goods); in other words the study identifies that women for example may use a car share service because they feel satisfied, and it makes them feel good about their spending.
• Another motivator that appears to be more important for women is environmental concerns; car sharing is made more attractive to women than to men if it can be argued to be more environmentally sustainable than car ownership.
• There is evidence that women use car sharing systems to supplement mobility whereas the ability to test out new car models encouraged men’s participation. The same study noted that employed women with children were less likely to be members than employed men with children.
• Finally, several studies have identified concerns about personal safety influence women’s usage more than men’s.

The table below maps what these studies have shown to advice to improve female participation in carsharing, divided into 4 groups of factors: emphasising utility, economic, environmental and trust/safety.

At Good Travel Software, we recognise the importance of ensuring that a car share service maximises its utilisation. Increasing female participation is one way that this can be achieved and we would be very happy to discuss these ideas with you and how they might apply to your system.