Gender Differences in Commuting over Municipality Borders : A study of regional Human Capital’s effect on commuting in Sweden

Gender equality has increased over time, and the question of how it progresses is highly important. Commuting behavior is an essential theme in Economic research since it, for example, affects the market structure, the distribution of labor, and economic growth. The purpose is to investigate how human capital impacts individuals’ commuting to work, and especially if human capital has different effects on women and men. To construct our model, we present several factors of interest that affect commuting, where human capital is the main variable investigated. Previous research show that women’s commuting behavior differs from men’s. By analyzing data from 2016, we aim to study the difference between women and men, by investigating the factors that impact their commuting for work over municipality borders in Sweden. The contribution of this paper is to increase the understanding of commuting within regional economics and gender studies. Our result show that human capital affects net outgoing commuting for both women and men, but the extent of the effect differs. Women are less affected by the level of human capital, and they still commute less than men although more women obtain higher human capital, in terms of education.