Gender structures in car availability in car deficient households

This paper studies the intra-household allocation of cars in car deficient households from a gender perspective. An individual's car access is measured in terms of duration of car use over a week. Car deficient households are defined as households with fewer cars than drivers. We develop a set of hypotheses that serve to explain gender differences in car availability, and empirically test some of these hypotheses by using multiple regression analysis. The data we use is the German Mobility Panel 1994-2008. Our findings provide evidence for the importance of social roles and economic power in intra-household negotiations about the limited resource of the household car. We cannot clearly decipher whether patriarchal structures and/or gender preferences are relevant as well, but our data suggest that both may play a role.