Achieving Climate Objectives in Transport Policy by Including Women and Challenging Gender Norms – the Swedish case

This paper explores whether women can become the change agents for a sustainable transport sector and how such a change can be accomplished through transport policy. Based on the Swedish case, women still on average have transportation behaviour with lower environmental impact than men have; women also tend to have stronger preferences for improving sustainability in the sector. The results imply that there are interesting behaviour and attitude characteristics expressed by women that ought to be recognised and applied e.g. through contesting prevailing norms and methods, in order to achieve sustainability goals for the sector. Altogether this suggests that women, beyond democracy reasons, should become more active as change agents to challenge the dominant male norms. Policy implications of these findings include measures to improve gender equal participation would e.g. make it possible to take advantage of these differences. Putting more emphasis on the relationships between travel patterns, sustainability and gendering on all levels in transportation planning as a measure for improved sustainability. Implementing new ways of framing the problems to be solved, challenging existing norms working against gender equity and raising consciousness of sustainability issues. Using gender mainstreaming to monitor policy impacts on different groups of men and women. However, today there is a lack of incentives to apply these tools. Since there is a tremendous complexity in the relationships on all levels, more research is needed together with improved dissemination of knowledge for the competence to increase within the transport sector