Going the Distance : The Impact of Commute on Gender Diversity in Public Service

Problem definition: Women have been shown to prefer jobs with a better work-life balance across many fields. Given that serving as a state political representative requires a significant amount of travel between one’s home district and the state capitol, this suggests that long commute distances may reduce the number of women seeking political office in the United States. At the same time, many political positions are part-time, making them more desirable to women.We analyze the extent to which high commute distances deter female political participation and whether this effect is mitigated by the availability of part-time work. Furthermore, we investigate policies that can lower the barrier to entry for women in politics. Methodology/results: Leveraging differences in distance to the state capitol among state house districts, we use a sharp regression discontinuity design to show that state house districts located further from the state capitol have a lower percentage of female candidates, but this effect disappears in part-time state legislatures. Then, we conduct a conjoint survey experiment administered to a pool of college students to understand how a variety of policies, including work-from-home policies, daycare benefits, part-time working hours, and paid parental leave, could help to close the gender gap in politics.We find that paid parental leave is the policy most likely to temper the differential effect of a longer commute distance on women entering politics. Managerial implications: For organizers and policymakers seeking to encourage more women to run for office, our work shows that commute distance is an important factor for would-be candidates and that making paid parental leave available may help. Moreover, this work makes an important technical contribution: it offers a novel approach for empiricists to use a regression discontinuity framework for observations that vary across geographic boundaries