Female Commuting, Female Labor Supply, and Female-Only Ridehailing System in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Women in Saudi Arabia are no longer banned from driving since 2018. However, anecdotal evidence indicates that females still rely on male relatives, hired drivers, or ride-hailing to travel, and the unemployment rate is especially high among well-educated young women. Indicated by regional science and labor economy studies that focused on gender disparities, this study hypothesizes that when commute cost is high, female workers might 1) quit jobs, 2) reduce their daily hours of work, or 3) take closer-to-home but less-matched jobs. However, no study exists to quantify the associations between female commute cost and labor supply in Saudi Arabia due to the data scarcity on disaggregated-level female mobility patterns. To fill the gap, this study identifies more than two thousand female workers whose majority of taxi rides were home-to-work trips based on a million female ride-hailing trips data. Their commute costs regarding 1) distance, 2) time, 3) money and 4) burden, and labor supplies regarding 1) employment rate, 2) hours of work and 3) job-skill mismatch extent are inferred. The associations between female commuting cost and labor supply are then quantified using multivariate regression analysis. Furthermore, given the increasing safety concerns of female riders when traveling with male stranger drivers, providing a female-only ride-hailing service can improve riders’ safety confidence, which in return might improve women’s mobility and employment outcomes. While being a female driver could be a decent job. However, whether a female-only system is feasible will be subject to the number of female drivers available. Since drivers join ridehailing platforms to earn incomes, this study simulates the tradeoffs between female drivers’ effective hourly earning rate and female riders’ pick-up delay simultaneously, under a minimum fleet size framework. The results indicate that the effective hourly earning rate of an average prospective female driver is about 80% of the mean female job wage, justifying the feasibility of such a gender-dedicated service for Riyadh. This study enriches Regional Science and Time Geography studies with mobility big data and operational research to investigate issues important to feminists with special interests in Saudi Arabia and ride-hailing services.