In this article, we investigate the contribution of increasing travel times to the persistent gender gap in labor market participation. In doing so, we estimate the effect of commuting times on the labor supply of men and women in the USA using microdata from the censuses of the last two decades. To address endogeneity concerns, we adopt an instrumental variables approach that exploits the shape of cities as an exogenous source of variation for travel times. Our estimates indicate that a 10-min increase in commuting time decreases the probability of married women participating in the labor market by 4.4 percentage points. In contrast, the estimated effect on men is small and statistically insignificant. When exploring potential mechanisms behind the gender asymmetry in our results, we do not find evidence that differences in labor market productivity within couples contribute to the larger penalty of commuting times on women. However, we do find that the negative effect on women increases with the number of children and is larger among those originating from countries with more gendered social norms. Based on this evidence, we conclude that in a context of increasing commuting costs the presence of gender norms that attribute to women the role of main caregivers may prevent gender convergence.

中文翻译：

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通勤时间和劳动力市场参与中的性别差距

在这篇文章中，我们调查了增加旅行时间对劳动力市场参与中持续存在的性别差距的贡献。为此，我们使用过去二十年人口普查的微观数据估算了通勤时间对美国男性和女性劳动力供应的影响。为了解决内生性问题，我们采用了一种工具变量方法，该方法将城市形状作为旅行时间变化的外生来源。我们的估计表明，通勤时间每增加 10 分钟，已婚女性参与劳动力市场的可能性就会降低 4.4 个百分点。相比之下，估计对男性的影响很小且在统计上不显着。在我们的结果中探索性别不对称背后的潜在机制时，我们没有发现证据表明夫妻之间劳动力市场生产力的差异导致女性通勤时间的增加。然而，我们确实发现，对女性的负面影响随着孩子数量的增加而增加，并且在来自具有更多性别社会规范的国家的女性中影响更大。基于这一证据，我们得出结论，在通勤成本增加的背景下，将女性作为主要照顾者的角色的性别规范的存在可能会阻止性别趋同。