Laboratory

Migration and Mobility

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Social and Gender Inequalities in Geographic Mobility

Egor Kotov, Daniela Perrotta, Emilio Zagheni; in Collaboration with John Palmer (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain), Frederic Bartumeus (Spanish National Research Council, Blanes Centre for Advanced Studies, Spain), Leo Ferres (Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile)

Detailed Description

Geographic mobility, ranging from daily travel to long-term migration, is a fundamental dimension of social and economic life, yet it is unevenly distributed across populations. Existing literature has documented disparities in mobility by socioeconomic status (SES), gender, and other social characteristics, but important gaps remain in our understanding of how these inequalities manifest across different spatial and temporal scales. This issue is particularly relevant in the context of preexisting inequalities that may be further amplified by crises or shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, thus highlighting how structural constraints shape individuals’ ability to move.

The main goal of this project is to investigate how patterns of geographic mobility differ across sociodemographic and economic groups, and to advance the study of social and gender inequalities in geographic mobility. This project leverages high-resolution spatiotemporal mobility data enriched with information on demographics and socioeconomic characteristics. The sources of these data include mobile phone records and credit card transaction data, which capture different dimensions of human movement. By integrating these data sources, we seek to systematically examine how mobility patterns differ by gender, age, and SES, and how these disparities vary across cities and countries. 

Our previous work has analyzed internal migration and daily mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating that mobility reductions were not uniform across populations (Elejalde et al. 2024). Individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds exhibited less capacity to reduce their mobility, reflecting their occupational constraints and limited access to remote work. These findings highlight how crises can exacerbate existing inequalities and underscore the importance of incorporating social stratification into mobility analyses.

Building on these contributions, our ongoing work explores gendered and intersectional mobility patterns in multiple urban contexts. In Paris, we use mobile phone data to characterize differences in mobility behavior between men and women, focusing on temporal patterns, spatial coverage, and activity diversity. Preliminary results suggest that women tend to exhibit more constrained mobility patterns, potentially reflecting caregiving responsibilities and safety considerations. In Madrid, we analyze credit card transaction data to investigate mobility differentials by gender, age, and SES, revealing complex interactions between economic activity and movement patterns.

A key component of this project is improving access to mobility data through tools such as the spanishoddata R package, which lowers technical barriers to accessing a large-scale mobility dataset in Spain (Kotov et al. 2026). This contribution is crucial for enabling broader participation in mobility research, fostering reproducibility, and supporting comparative studies.

Taken together, these research strands provide a strong foundation for this research agenda. By combining large-scale, passively collected, geolocated mobility data with information on socioeconomic characteristics at both the group and individual levels, we aim to develop a more robust and nuanced understanding of mobility inequalities.

Looking ahead, this project will further integrate cross-country analyses to identify common patterns and context-specific dynamics of mobility inequalities. We aim to expand the methodological toolkit by combining multiple data sources and developing scalable approaches for measuring mobility disparities. By bridging data, methods, and substantive insights, this project seeks to contribute to a more comprehensive and equitable understanding of geographic mobility.

Publications

Kotov, E.; Vidal-Tortosa, E.; García Cantú Ros, O.; Burrieza-Galán, J.; Herranz, R.; Gullón Muñoz-Repiso, T.; Lovelace, R.:

spanishoddata: a package for accessing and working with Spanish Open Mobility Big Data

Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 1–13. (2026)    

Kotov, E.:

Workshop: Analysing massive open human mobility data in R using spanishoddata, duckdb and flowmaps

AGIT Conference 1:1, 229–231. (2025)    

Elejalde, E.; Ferres, L.; Navarro, V.; Bravo, L.; Zagheni, E.:

The social stratification of internal migration and daily mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic

Scientific Reports 14:12140, 1–11. (2024)