  There are substantial differences in travel behavior by gender on public
transit. Studies have concluded that these differences are largely attributable
to household responsibilities typically falling disproportionately on women,
leading to women being more likely to utilize transit for purposes referred to
by the umbrella concept of "mobility of care". In contrast to past studies that
have quantified the impact of gender using survey and qualitative data, we
propose a novel data-driven workflow utilizing a combination of previously
developed origin, destination, and transfer inference (ODX) based on individual
transit fare card transactions, name-based gender inference, and geospatial
analysis as a framework to identify mobility of care trip making. We apply this
framework to data from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority
(WMATA). Analyzing data from millions of journeys conducted in the first
quarter of 2019, the results of this study show that our proposed workflow can
identify mobility of care travel behavior, detecting times and places of
interest where the share of women travelers in an equally-sampled subset (on
basis of inferred gender) of transit users is 10% - 15% higher than that of
men. The workflow presented in this study provides a blueprint for combining
transit origin-destination data, inferred customer demographics, and geospatial
analyses enabling public transit agencies to assess, at the fare card level,
the gendered impacts of different policy and operational decisions.
