Before 2018, Saudi Arabia was the only country that enshrined a legal prohibition on women driving. However, little has been done to empirically investigate the associations between female commute cost and labor supply before the driving ban was lifted. This is largely due to the data scarcity on disaggregated-level female mobility patterns and travel behaviors. To fill the gap, this study deployed a space-time framework to identify suspicious female roundtrip commuters whose majority of taxi trips were between home and workplaces based on about one million e-hailing O-D data from female passengers in Riyadh. Her commute costs (i.e., distance, time, out-of-pocket cost, commute burden) and labor supply information (i.e., work hours, skill-job mismatch) were then inferred by supplementing neighborhood-level Census data and open data on major female employers. Overall, female riders had significantly longer travel distance/time and higher out-of-pocket costs than male passengers. Though no causal statements were made, higher commute burden was related to lower Saudi female employment rate and longer working hours, while lower burden was associated with higher skill-job mismatch in terms of over-education, confirming our hypotheses that well-educated Saudi females might 1) choose not to work, 2) extend hours of work to offset travel costs, or 3) switch to nearby jobs with lower wage and skill-job match. Therefore, females’ restricted mobility became a non-negligible job market friction. Meanwhile, females worked in the manufacturing sector could pay more than 75% of her wages on e-taxis, implying a sector-specific spatial mismatch issue. Our findings provide a useful baseline on the female travel cost and labor supply situations before the lifting of driving ban. It enables comparative studies to understand the impacts of ongoing women empowerment for mobility and employment autonomy. The space-time framework also provides useful references for future research when gender-specific travel behavior surveys are not feasible.

中文翻译：

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挖掘利雅得女性通勤者类型、通勤成本与劳动力供给——基于电召车出租车数据的时空调查


在 2018 年之前，沙特阿拉伯是唯一一个在法律上禁止女性开车的国家。然而，在取消驾驶禁令之前，很少有人对女性通勤成本与劳动力供应之间的关联进行实证调查。这主要是由于关于分类女性出行模式和出行行为的数据稀缺。为了填补这一空白，这项研究部署了一个时空框架来识别可疑的女性往返通勤者，她们的大部分出租车行程都是在家庭和工作场所之间进行的，这些数据基于利雅得女性乘客的约 100 万个电召车 O-D 数据。然后，通过补充社区级人口普查数据和主要女性雇主的开放数据来推断她的通勤成本（即距离、时间、自付费用、通勤负担）和劳动力供应信息（即工作时间、技能与工作不匹配）。总体而言，女性乘客的旅行距离/时间明显更长，自付费用也更高。虽然没有做出因果关系陈述，但较高的通勤负担与较低的沙特女性就业率和更长的工作时间有关，而较低的负担与较高的技能与工作不匹配有关，就过度教育而言，这证实了我们的假设，即受过良好教育的沙特女性可能 1） 选择不工作，2） 延长工作时间以抵消差旅费用， 或 3） 换到附近工资较低且技能与工作相匹配的工作。因此，女性的行动不便成为不可忽视的就业市场摩擦。与此同时，在制造业工作的女性可以支付超过 75% 的电动出租车工资，这意味着存在特定行业的空间错配问题。我们的研究结果为解除驾驶禁令之前女性旅行成本和劳动力供应情况提供了有用的基线。 它使比较研究能够了解正在进行的女性赋权对流动性和就业自主性的影响。当性别特异性旅行行为调查不可行时，时空框架也为未来的研究提供了有用的参考。