This talk by Tobias Reisch will be taking place online on Friday June 26 from 3pm – 4pm (CEST/UTC+2). If you would like to join, please click here
Abstract:
Gender biases exist in a wide variety of human behavior. Examples are mobility, communication and leisure activities. Mobile phone datasets allow to investigate human behavior on very large study populations without introducing any observation bias. By studying mobile phone usage data in Austria during the COVID-19 crisis we are able to quantify gender differences in response to stress and crisis in a huge natural experiment. The dataset allows us to quantify changes in mobility, communication and sleep patterns. We find that existing gender biases in mobility and communication are increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Males generally return to normal much quicker and the effects are not distributed evenly across age cohorts. For both genders, but even stronger in females, we observe a drastic increase in call duration. These findings relate strongly to existing literature, implying that females cope more actively with stress and males are more prone to risk taking.