MJ National Survey

Gender

Key findings on gender and transport poverty across Canada

How people get around is shaped by gender*. Travel needs, safety concerns, and the barriers people face are not the same across genders. Women and gender-diverse people often make more complex trips and encounter greater challenges around affordability, safety, and service reliability.

These findings come from the Mobilizing Justice National Survey on Transport Poverty. Women are less likely to cycle and more likely to find transportation unaffordable than men. Gender-diverse individuals face the sharpest barriers: lower vehicle access, higher transit reliance, and transport costs and healthcare access gaps that far exceed those reported by women and men.

Women are less likely to bike to work or school
WomenMenGender-diverse**
Never bike to work85%70%66%
Never bike to school92%63%64%
Women are less likely to bike to work or school

Women are less likely to cycle than men or gender-diverse individuals. 85% of women never bike to work, compared to 70% of men and 66% of gender-diverse individuals. Cycling to work at least once a week was also more common among gender-diverse individuals (over one-quarter) than among men (about one-fifth) or women (just over one-tenth).

The gap is even wider for travel to school: 92% of women never bike to school, versus 63% of men and 64% of gender-diverse individuals. Men walk or bike to school at least once a week about 9 percentage points more than women and use bike-and-ride combinations 19 percentage points more. gender-diverse individuals bike to school at considerably higher rates than both groups, nearly 29 percentage points more than women and 20 percentage points more than men. Overall, the findings suggest that women are likely to experience unique barriers to biking compared to men and gender-diverse individuals.

Notably, women reported never biking to work even when they own at least one bike and have previously used bikeshare at a rate 15 percentage points higher than men and 19 percentage points higher than gender-diverse individuals. This suggests the barrier is not simply one of access. Other factors, such as perceived safety concerns, social norms and caregiving responsibilities may also play a role, consistent with existing research on gendered experiences of cycling.

Transport barriers limit access to employment and healthcare, especially for gender-diverse individuals
Agreed or strongly agreed that they have declined employment opportunities due to their transport situation (%)
Women
26%
Men
29%
Gender-diverse**
50%
Transport options enable reaching healthcare (%)
Women
73%
Men
72%
Gender-diverse**
50%
Transport barriers limit access to employment and healthcare, especially for gender-diverse individuals

Half of gender-diverse respondents reported that their transport situation has led them to decline employment opportunities, nearly double the rate of women (26%) and men (29%). The same share, 50%, felt that available transport options enable them to reach healthcare, compared to around 72–73% of women and men. Across both dimensions, the gap is roughly 22–24 percentage points.

A key part of the context here is modal mismatch. Nearly 25% of gender-diverse individuals reported travelling by a mode they would not choose if alternatives were available, a noticeably higher rate than among women and men. When people are forced into transport arrangements that do not meet their needs, the downstream effects on employment access, healthcare access, and quality of life are real and compounding.

Gender-diverse individuals rely more on transit and less on private vehicles

Respondents with access to a private vehicle (%)

85%
Women
86%
Men
67%
Gender-diverse**
Gender-diverse individuals rely more on transit and less on private vehicles

Gender-diverse individuals reported private vehicle access nearly 19 percentage points lower than both men and women. They also hold transit passes at a rate about 13–15 percentage points higher (33%, compared to 18% of women and 20% of men), reflecting a much greater reliance on public transit for daily travel.

This flows through to commuting behaviour: gender-diverse individuals drive to work at least once a week at rates nearly 22 percentage points lower than women and 26 percentage points lower than men, while taking transit to work at rates 12–15 percentage points higher.

Gender-diverse individuals also reported a notably higher rate of mismatch between their most frequent and preferred travel modes (nearly 25%), suggesting that for many, this reliance on transit and active modes reflects constraint rather than choice.

Gender-diverse individuals are more likely to find transit unreliable and unaffordable
Find public transit reliable (%)
Women
57%
Men
64%
Gender-diverse**
42%
Spending more on transport than they can afford (%)
Women
39%
Men
32%
Gender-diverse**
52%
Gender-diverse individuals are more likely to find transit unreliable and unaffordable

Gender-diverse individuals are the least likely to find transit reliable. Only 42% view it as reliable, compared to 57% of women and 64% of men. This 22-point gap with men is particularly striking given that gender-diverse individuals rely on transit at much higher rates. When the mode you depend on most is also the one you trust least, the consequences for daily mobility are significant.

The affordability picture compounds this. More than half of gender-diverse respondents (52%) reported spending more on transportation than they can afford, compared to 39% of women and 32% of men. Women also experience greater affordability strain than men, pointing to a consistent pattern where transport costs weigh most heavily on those with the least financial flexibility. Together, these findings suggest that gender-diverse individuals face compounding pressures: a transit system they rely on heavily but trust least, and transport costs that strain their budgets more than any other group.

*Survey results are presented using three gender categories: women, men, and gender-diverse. The valid total raw sample size is 27,031, comprising 15,977 women (59.1%), 10,542 men (39.0%), and 512 gender-diverse respondents (1.9%). To ensure that the results are representative of the Canadian population, analyses use weighted sample sizes: 30,554,081 in total, including 15,454,297 women (50.6%), 14,645,957 men (47.9%), and 453,827 gender-diverse respondents (1.5%).

**Gender-diverse refers to respondents whose reported gender identity falls outside cisgender and/or binary understandings of gender. This analytical category includes respondents identifying as trans man, trans woman, Two-Spirit, bigender, genderqueer, non-binary, agender, demigender, genderfluid, as well as respondents who selected “prefer not to answer” or “other” and provided a self-described gender identity indicating a gender-diverse identity. These identities were aggregated into a single analytical category to ensure sufficient sample size and protect respondent confidentiality. This grouping is an analytical decision and does not imply that the identities represented are equivalent or constitute a homogeneous population; rather, it reflects the diversity of gender identities captured by the survey while allowing for meaningful statistical analysis.

Research and writing: Paromita Nakshi, Andrei Botescu, Ignacio Tiznado-Aitken and Steven Farber
Data visualization: Jeff Allen