| Abstract: | Local labour market areas (LLMAs) are usually defined on the basis of total commuting flows between constituent ‘building block’ areas. Indeed the 1984 revision of Travel-To-Work Areas (TTWAs) was based on aggregate flows between 1981 Census wards. It is widely recognized, however, that various sub-groups of the population have distinctive commuting patterns. TTWAs therefore represent the outcome of an ‘averaging’ of the journey-to-work patterns of different gender, socio-economic and occupational groups. In this preliminary review, the self-containment of TTWAs in England and Wales, which have been generated using aggregate data, is assessed at the simplest level of disaggregation of the commuting data: disaggregation by gender. In accordance with expectations, it is found that TTWAs defined on the basis of total commuting flows are generally more self-contained for females than for males, and that those TTWAs which are insufficiently self-contained to be considered as LLMAs for males are overwhelmingly concentrated in the most urbanized regions. These findings are reinforced by the results of re-running the TTWA regionalization algorithm against 1981 flow data for males and females in order to create gender-specific TTWAs; disparities between Male and Female TTWAs are greatest in the most urbanized regions. Such differences are investigated in greater detail for two Metropolitan Regions (MRs): the combined Liverpool and Manchester MRs in the north-west and the London MR in the south-east. |
