Women’s mobility in Santiago, Chile: Reproduction of inequalities in the metropolis, neighbourhood, and public space

The social construction that links women to the support and survival of households characterizes them as a group with low amount of available time and limited capacities to perform urban trips. This limitation is translated into a different mobility, which is enclosed and vulnerable to diverse phenomena such as residential location and quality of public space. In the case of Santiago, Chile, there are considerable mobility differences depending on gender, age and income; emphasizing the higher fragility of low income groups that inhabit the neighborhoods created by the State during the second half of the past century. Through quantitative indicators and qualitative tools, the present paper aims to characterize three scales of women’s mobility in Santiago: metropolitan, neighborhood, and local. The evidence shows disparities at all the levels: in the metropolitan scale, high income women perform a high number of trips, and most of them are motorized; on the other hand, pedestrian trips are predominant in the low income groups. In a smaller scale, in the neighborhoods, pedestrian trips are strongly affected by social and environmental factors such as security perception.