In April 2017 veteran BBC journalist Samira Ahmed wanted to use a toilet. She was at a screening of I Am Not Your Negro at London’s famous Barbican arts centre, and it was the interval. Any woman who has ever been to the theatre knows what this means: a rush as soon as the lights go up to try to beat the inevitable queue that will soon be snaking it way across the foyer floor.
Women are used to queueing when they go out. It’s frustrating and puts a dampener on their evening. No nice interval chit-chat about the show with friends over a drink, just dull, tedious lining up, occasionally leavened by the knowing eye rolls they share with their fellow waiting women.
But this evening was different. This evening, the queue was worse than usual. Far worse. Because in an almost comically blatant display of not having thought about women at all, the Barbican had turned both the male and female toilets gender neutral simply by replacing the ‘men’ and ‘women’ signage with ‘gender neutral with urinals’ and ‘gender neutral with cubicles’. The obvious happened. Only men were using the supposedly ‘gender neutral with urinals’ and everyone was using the ‘gender neutral with cubicles’.
Rather than rendering the toilets actually gender neutral by this move, they had simply increased the provision for men: women are generally not able to use urinals, while men are of course able to use both urinals and cubicles. There were also no sanitary bins in the ‘gender neutral with urinals’ toilets. ‘Ah the irony of having to explain discrimination having just been to see I Am Not Your Negro IN YOUR CINEMA’, Ahmed tweeted, suggesting that the solution would be to ‘turn the gents into gender-neutral loos. There’s NEVER such a queue there & you know it.’1
Although this truism seems to have passed the Barbican’s heavily male-dominated management team by, it is true that the perennial queueing problem is one that men do tend to know about – given it so often spills out of the main bathroom door, it’s hard for even the most oblivious man to miss.2 But fewer people – men or women – know exactly why it happens. There is a tendency (as ever) to blame the women rather than male-biased design. But male-biased design is in fact exactly what the problem is here.
On the face of it, it may seem fair and equitable to accord male and female public toilets the same amount of floor space – and historically, this is the way it has been done. 50/50 division of floor space has even been formalised in plumbing codes. However, if a male toilet has both cubicles and urinals, the number of people who can relieve themselves at once is far higher per square foot of floor space in the male bathroom than in the female bathroom. Suddenly equal floor space isn’t so equal.
But even if male and female toilets had an equal number of stalls, the issue wouldn’t be resolved, because women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet.3 Women make up the majority of the elderly and disabled, two groups that will tend to need more time in the toilet. Women are also more likely to be accompanied by children, as well as disabled and older people.4 Then there’s the 20-25% of women of childbearing age who may be on their period at any one time, and therefore needing to change a tampon or a sanitary pad.
Women may also in any case require more trips to the bathroom than men: pregnancy significantly reduces bladder capacity, and women are eight times more likely to suffer from urinary-tract infections than men which again increases the frequency with which a toilet visit is needed.5 In the face of all these anatomical differences, it would surely take a formal (rather than substantive) equality dogmatist to continue to argue that equal floor space between men and women is fair.
It gets a lot worse than supposedly equal provision being in fact male-biased. A third of the world’s population lack adequate toilet provision at all.6 According to the UN, one in three women lack access to safe toilets,7 and WaterAid reports that girls and women collectively spend 97 billion hours a year finding a safe place to relieve themselves.8 The lack of adequate toilet provision is a public health problem for both sexes (for example, in India, where 60% of the population does not have access to a toilet,9 90% of surface water is contaminated10), but the problem is particularly acute for women, in no small part because of the attitude that men can ‘go anywhere’,11 while for women to be seen urinating is shameful. Women get up before dawn and then wait for hours until dusk to go out again in search of a relatively private place to urinate or defecate.12 And this isn’t just a problem in poor countries: Human Rights Watch spoke to young girls working in tobacco fields in America and found that they would ‘refrain from relieving themselves at all during the day – aided by avoiding drinking liquids, which increased their risk of dehydration and heat illness’.13
This affects women’s paid labour: women make up 91% of the 86% of Indians who work in the informal economy. Many of these women work as market vendors, and no public toilets means they have nowhere to go during the workday.14 In Afghanistan, female police officers go to the toilets in pairs, because their changing and toilet facilities (described by an international advisor to Human Rights Watch as ‘a site of harassment’) often have peepholes or doors which don’t lock. The lack of safe toilet provision in fact often prevents women from joining the force at all, and this in turn has had a significant impact on how the police respond to crimes against women and girls.15
Despite women’s arguably greater need for public sanitary facilities, however, men are often the ones who are better provided for. More than half of Mumbai’s 5 million women do not have an indoor toilet and there are no free public toilets for women. Meanwhile, free urinals for men run into the thousands.16 A typical Mumbai slum might have six bathrooms for 8,000 women,17 and government figures from 2014 revealed that the city as a whole has ‘3,536 public restrooms that women share with men, but not a single women’s-only facility – not even in some police stations and courts’.18
A 2015 survey found that 12.5% of women in Mumbai’s slums defecate in the open at night: they ‘prefer to take this risk to walking 58 metres, the average distance of the community toilet from their homes’.19 But defecating in the open isn’t really much safer for women: there is a real danger of sexual assault from men who lurk near and on the routes to areas which are known to be used by women when they need to relieve themselves.20 The level of violation ranges from voyeurism (including being masturbated at) to rape – and in extreme cases, to murder.
Accurate data on the level of sexual harassment and assault faced by women as they seek to engage in what should be a mundane activity is hard to come by, in no small degree because of the shame surrounding the issue. Few women are willing to talk about something they may well be blamed for ‘encouraging’.21 But what data does exist makes it clear that a failure to provide adequate sanitation is a feminist issue.
A 2016 study found that Indian women who use fields to relieve themselves are twice as likely to face non-partner sexual violence as women with a household toilet.22 Following the 2014 murder of two girls aged twelve and fourteen in Uttar Pradesh,23 there was a brief flurry of national focus on the lack of adequate toilet provision for women, and in December 2014, Bombay’s high court ordered all municipal corporations to provide safe and clean toilets for women near main roads.24 Ninety-six potential sites were identified and Bombay’s local government promised 50 million rupees (around £550,000) to build new toilets. But a year later, reported online women’s rights magazine Broadly, not a single brick had been laid.25 The fund allocation lapsed in 2016.26
Local governments that fail to provide public toilets may believe that they are cutting costs, but a 2015 Yale study suggests that this is a false economy. The study authors developed a mathematical model linking the ‘risk of sexual assault to the number of sanitation facilities and the time a woman must spend walking to a toilet’, and calculated the tangible costs (lost earnings, medical, court and prison expenses) and intangible costs (pain and suffering, risk of homicide) of sexual assault versus the cost of installing and maintaining toilets.
They applied their model to Khayelitsha, a township in South Africa, which has an estimated 5,600 toilets for a population of 2.4 million, resulting, the authors claimed, in 635 sexual assaults at a cost of $40 million each year. Increasing the number of toilets to 11,300, at a direct cost of $12 million, would almost half the average distance to a toilet and result in a 30% decrease in sexual assault. According to the mathematical model, the reduced social and policing costs more than offset the additional cost of providing toilets, leaving the township $5 million better off. These figures, they added, were conservative, since their costings had not included ‘the many additional health benefits of improving sanitation in resource-constrained urban areas’.27
And there are many additional health benefits, particularly for women. Women get bladder and urinary-tract infections from holding in their urine; others suffer from dehydration or chronic constipation.28 Women who defecate outdoors are at risk of a range of infections and diseases, including pelvic inflammatory disease, worm infections, hepatitis, diarrhoea, cholera, polio and waterborne diseases. Some of these diseases kill millions of people (particularly women and children) every year in India alone.29
Health problems arising from a lack of public sanitary provision are not restricted to low-income countries. Canadian and British studies have revealed that referrals for urinary-tract infections, problems with distended bladders, and a range of other uro-gynaecological problems have increased proportionately to toilet closure; similarly, research shows that the chances of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome from sanitary protection are increased ‘if there are no toilets available to change tampons during menstruation’.30 And, increasingly, there isn’t a toilet available. A 2007 study revealed that public-toilet closure in the US has been a trend for over half a century.31 In the UK, 50% of public toilets were closed between 1995 and 2013 – or, as in the public toilet closest to where I live in London, converted into the proverbial hipster bar.32
Urban planning that fails to account for women’s risk of being sexually assaulted is a clear violation of women’s equal right to public spaces – and inadequate sanitary provision is only one of the many ways planners exclude women with this kind of gender-insensitive design.
Women are often scared in public spaces. In fact, they are around twice as likely to be scared as men. And, rather unusually, we have the data to prove it. ‘Crime surveys and empirical studies from different parts of the world show that a majority of women are fearful of the potential violence against them when in public spaces,’ explains urban-planning professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris. Analyses of crime data from the US and Sweden both show that women and men respond to similar environmental conditions differently, with women tending to be ‘more sensitive than men to signs of danger and social disorder, graffiti, and unkempt and abandoned buildings’.
A UK Department for Transport study highlighted the stark difference between male and female perceptions of danger, finding that 62% of women are scared walking in multistorey car parks, 60% are scared waiting on train platforms, 49% are scared waiting at the bus stop, and 59% are scared walking home from a bus stop or station. The figures for men are 31%, 25%, 20% and 25%, respectively.33 Fear of crime is particularly high among low-income women, partly because they tend to live in areas with higher crime rates, but also because they are likely to be working odd hours34 and often come home from work in the dark.35 Ethnic-minority women tend to experience more fear for the same reasons, as well as having the added danger of (often gendered) racialised violence to contend with.
This fear impacts on women’s mobility and their basic right of access to the city.36 Studies from Finland, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Taiwan and the UK all show that women adjust their behaviour and their travel patterns to accommodate this fear.37 They avoid specific routes, times and modes of transport. They avoid travelling at night. In one Canadian study exactly half of the women surveyed ‘indicated that fear prevents them from using public transportation or parking garages’38 and studies from around the world find that fear of crime is ‘amongst the most important reasons women choose not to use public transport’.39 If they can afford to, they choose to drive or take a taxi instead.
The trouble is, many of them can’t afford to. Most passengers are ‘transit captives’, meaning that they have no reasonable means other than public transport to get from one place to another.40 This lack of choice particularly affects low-income women, and those living in the global south – in India, for example, women have limited access41 to private transport and therefore rely on public transport to a far greater extent than men.42 These women adopt strategies such as taking a longer roundabout route or only travelling while accompanied. Some women go as far as quitting their jobs – a solution that is not limited to those on low incomes.43 When I tweeted about women’s experiences of harassment on public transport, one man replied to tell me about ‘a very intelligent and capable woman’ he knows, who ‘gave up a really good job in the City and moved out of London because she hated being groped on the Tube’.
Clearly, there is an injustice here. But all too often the blame is put on women themselves for feeling fearful, rather than on planners for designing urban spaces and transit environments that make them feel unsafe. And, as usual, the gender data gap is behind it all. The official statistics show that men are in fact more likely to be victims of crime in public spaces, including public transport. And this paradox, says Loukaitou-Sideris, ‘has led to the conclusion that women’s fear of crime is irrational and more of a problem than crime itself’. But, she points out, the official statistics do not tell the whole story.
As women navigate public spaces, they are also navigating a slew of threatening sexual behaviours. Before we even get to the more serious offences like being assaulted, women are dealing on a daily basis with behaviours from men that make – and are often calculated to make – them feel uncomfortable. Ranging from catcalling, to being leered at, to the use of ‘sexualised slurs [and] requests for someone’s name’, none of these behaviours is criminal exactly, but they all add up to a feeling of sexual menace.44 A feeling of being watched. Of being in danger – and in fact these behaviours can easily escalate. Enough women have experienced the sharp shift from ‘Smile, love, it might never happen,’ to ‘Fuck you bitch why are you ignoring me?’ to being followed home and assaulted, to know that an ‘innocent’ comment from a male stranger can be anything but.
But women don’t report these behaviours, because who could they report them to? Until the emergence of groups like ‘EverydaySexism’ and ‘Hollaback’, which give women a space in which they can talk about the intimidating-but-just-short-of-criminal behaviours they face in public spaces on a daily basis, public awareness of this behaviour was more or less non-existent. When police in Nottingham started recording misogynistic behaviour (everything from indecent exposure, to groping, to upskirting) as a hate crime (or if the behaviour was not strictly criminal, a hate incident), they found reports shot up – not because men had suddenly got much worse, but because women felt that they would be taken seriously.45
The invisibility of the threatening behaviour women face in public is compounded by the reality that men don’t do this to women who are accompanied by other men – who are in any case also much less likely to experience this kind of behaviour. A recent Brazilian survey found that two-thirds of women had been victims of sexual harassment and violence while in transit, half of them on public transportation. The proportion among men was 18%.46 So men who didn’t do it and didn’t experience it simply didn’t know it was going on. And they all too often dismissed women who told them about it with an airy ‘Well I’ve never seen it.’ Another gender data gap.
And one that is exacerbated by how we collect the data. ‘Large-scale data for the prevalence of sexual harassment is lacking’, explains a 2017 paper, not only because of under-reporting, but also because it is ‘often not included in crime statistics’.47 Added to this is the problem that sexual harassment ‘is often poorly classified’, with many studies failing to either ‘define harassment or codify harassment types’. In 2014, the Australia Institute found that 87% of the women surveyed had experienced verbal or physical street harassment, but data ‘concerning the extent or form of incidences were not collected’.
The apparent mismatch between women’s fear and the level of violence the official statistics say they experience is not just about the general stew of menace women are navigating. Women also aren’t reporting the more serious offences. A 2016 survey of sexual harassment in the Washington DC metro found that 77% of those who were harassed never reported, which is around the same level found by Inmujeres, a Mexican government agency that campaigns on violence against women.48
The reporting rate is even lower in New York City, with an estimated 96% of sexual harassment and 86% of sexual assaults in the subway system going unreported, while in London, where a fifth of women have reportedly been physically assaulted while using public transport, a 2017 study found that ‘around 90% of people who experience unwanted sexual behaviour would not report it’.49 An NGO survey of female metro users in Baku, Azerbaijan found that none of the women who said they had been sexually harassed reported it to the appropriate authority.50
Clearly then, official police data is not showing the full picture. But although there is a lack of global data on ‘the exact nature, location and time’ of sexual crimes against women in public spaces, a growing body of research shows that women are in fact not being irrational.51
From Rio to Los Angeles men have raped women and girls on buses while drivers carry blithely along their routes.52 ‘The truth is that every time I leave my house, I am scared,’ said Victoria Juárez, a thirty-four-year old woman from Mexico where nine in ten women have experienced sexual harassment while using public transport,53 and female workers report that men hang around in cars ‘to kidnap women getting on and off buses’.54 Travelling to and from work is, they say, the most dangerous part of their day.
A 2016 study found that 90% of French women had been victims of sexual harassment on public transport;55 in May that year two men were jailed for an attempted gang rape on a Paris train.56 A 2016 Washington metro survey found that women were three times more likely than men to face harassment on public transport.57 In April that year58 a suspect was identified in an indecent exposure incident on the Washington metro; a month later he had escalated to raping a woman at knifepoint on a train.59 In October 2017 another repeat offender was arrested on the Washington metro: he had targeted the same victim twice.60
‘The message is unanimous across all articles of this special issue’, wrote professor of urban planning Vania Ceccato in her afterword to a 2017 special issue of the academic journal Crime Prevention and Community Safety, ‘Women’s Victimisation and Safety in Transit Environments’: ‘sexual crime against women in transit (cases of staring, touching, groping, ejaculation, exposing genitalia and full rape) is a highly under-reported offence’.61
Women don’t report for a variety of reasons. Some of these are societal: stigma, shame, concern that they’ll be blamed or disbelieved. And there is little that authorities can do about this. That change has to come from society itself. But many women don’t report for more prosaic issues that can be far more easily addressed.
For a start, women often aren’t sure exactly ‘what counts as sexual harassment and are afraid of the response of authorities’.62 Assuming they do realise that what has happened is wrong, they often don’t know who it is they have to report to.63 Around the world there is a lack of clear information for women on what to do if they are sexually harassed or assaulted on public transport (although most authorities seem to have managed to install clear signage about what to do in the event of spotting a suspicious package). Sometimes, though, the lack of signage is because there really aren’t any procedures in place.64 And this leads to the next problem: the experiences of those women who do report.
In 2017 a British woman tweeted about what happened when she reported a man who was sexually harassing her on a bus.65 After asking her what she expected him to do, the bus driver commented, ‘You’re a pretty girl, what do you expect?’ Her experience echoes that of a twenty-six-year-old woman riding a bus in Delhi: ‘It was around 9 p.m. A man standing behind touched me inappropriately. I shouted and caught the guy by his collar. I made the driver stop the bus too. But I was told to get off and solve it myself because other passengers were getting late.’66
Fear of being dismissed was why Sarah Hayward, a former local councillor for my borough in London, didn’t report. ‘I was felt up on a packed Tube train when I was about twenty-two. I can’t begin to explain the absolute terror of that feeling. And I just knew that if I said anything, people would think it was just that the Tube was packed.’ The irony is, the Tube having been packed may well have been a factor in what happened to her: the data we have suggests that peak travel times coincide with peak sexual harassment times.67 Hayward tells me that she still tries ‘to avoid the Tube in rush hour’.
The lack of reporting procedures for sexual assault is also a problem in the sky. A 2016 Slate article told the story of Dana T. who, mid-flight between the US and Germany, woke up to find a hand squeezing her breast hard.68 It belonged to the man sitting next to her. She told cabin crew who initially tried to make her sit back down. Eventually, they gave her a seat in business class, but although many of the crew were sympathetic, no one seemed to know what to do. When they landed, the man simply got off the plane and went on his way. A similar story emerged in 2017: American Airlines crew refused to move a woman to another seat when it became clear the man next to her was masturbating.69
The first step for transit authorities – which have a hugely male-dominated workforce from top to bottom – is to accept that they have a problem.70 When Loukaitou-Sideris wanted to find out how US transit agencies address women’s safety on public transport, she came across a gender data gap. She found only two papers from the 1990s, neither of which looked at the security needs of female passengers and which in any case were redundant given the huge changes that have been made to transport security post-9/11. There was a more recent paper from 2005, but it focused primarily on the response of US transit agencies to the threat of terrorism, ‘and did not investigate women’s concerns or their specific security needs’.
So Loukaitou-Sideris conducted her own survey. And she encountered some resistance from the male-dominated workforce she surveyed. ‘You’re assuming that the world is less safe for females,’ replied the male chief operating officer of one agency. The male safety and security manager of another insisted that ‘Safety and security issues and concerns are non-gender specific.’ And in a clear example of the damage the gender data gap does, another (male) safety and security officer refuted the need for gendered planning on the basis that ‘Statistical data for our system does not show females have a greater risk.’
Once they have accepted that they have a problem, step two for transport planners is to design evidence-based solutions. Of the 131 transit agencies (more than half of all the large and medium-sized transit operators in the US) that responded to Loukaitou-Sideris’s survey, ‘only one-third felt that transit agencies should really do something about it’, and only three agencies had actually done anything about it. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the chronic lack of data and research on women’s safety in transport settings, Loukaitou-Sideris also found ‘a significant mismatch between the safety and security needs and desires of female passengers and the types and locations of strategies that transit agencies use’.
Most of the agencies she surveyed had security strategies on their buses: 80% had CCTV; 76% had panic alarms; and 73% had public address systems. But the vast majority neither had, nor intended to install, security measures at bus stops. This is in diametric opposition to what women actually want: they are far more likely to feel scared waiting in the dark at a bus stop than they are to feel scared on the bus itself. And in fact, they are right to feel this way: one study found that people were over three times more likely to be a victim of crime at or near a transit stop than on the vehicle itself.71
The type of security transport agencies install also matters – and there is also a mismatch here. Transit agencies, possibly for cost reasons, vastly prefer technological solutions to hiring security officers. There is little available data on what impact CCTV has on harassment, but certainly repeated studies have found that women are deeply sceptical of its use, vastly preferring the presence of a conductor or security guard (that is, a preventative solution) as opposed to a blinking light in the corner which may or may not be monitored miles away.72 Interestingly, men prefer technological solutions to the presence of guards – perhaps because the types of crime they are more likely to experience are less personally violating.73
But if paying for a full-time guard is expensive (although arguably worth it if it increases women’s use of public transport), there are plenty of cheaper solutions available.74 Loukaitou-Sideris tells me that ‘the city of Portland has a digital timetable in the bus stop so you know when the next bus is going to come’, meaning women don’t have to wait for ages in the dark, simply because they don’t know the next bus is half an hour away. I admit, when I heard this presented as a radical solution I was shocked – in London it’s far more unusual to come across a bus stop without a digital timetable.
Other evidence-based75 solutions include transparent bus shelters for better visibility and increased lighting – not just at bus stops and metro stations themselves, but on the route to them.76 The location of the bus stop is also important: ‘sometimes even moving the bus stops a few feet up or down the block if it is in front of a well-used establishment’ can make all the difference, says Loukaitou-Sideris. My personal favourite approach is the introduction of request stops in between official stops for women travelling on night buses: although women make up the majority of bus users overall, they are in the minority when it comes to night buses, and while we don’t have data on why exactly this disparity exists, given the data we do have it seems reasonable to conclude that feeling unsafe might have something to do with it.77
The good news for transport planners is that, other than increased security guard presence and lighting, none of these measures is particularly costly. And research conducted by Loukaitou-Sideris in Los Angeles found that there were specific bus stops that were hotspots for gender-based crime, suggesting that costs could be kept further in check by focusing on problem areas.78 All each transport authority would need is its own data – and the will to collect it. But that will is lacking. In the US, Loukaitou-Sideris tells me, ‘there is no federal incentive’ for transit authorities to collect data. ‘They aren’t legally obligated to collect it and so they don’t.’ She doesn’t buy what she calls their ‘excuse’ that they don’t have the money.
In India (Delhi was ranked the fourth most dangerous public transport system in the world for women in 2014) following what came to be known as the ‘Delhi gang rape’, women are taking data collection into their own hands.79 This assault, which hit headlines around the world, began just after 9 p.m. on 16 December 2012 in south Delhi. Twenty-three-year-old physiotherapy student Jyoti Singh and her friend Avanindra Pandey had just finished watching Life of Pi at the cinema when they decided to board one of Delhi’s many private buses.80 Their plan was to go home – but they never got there. The two friends were first severely beaten with a rusty iron rod – and then the gang of six men stared to gang rape Singh. The attack (which included shoving the metal rod inside her) lasted nearly an hour, and was so brutal it perforated her colon.81 Eventually, having exhausted themselves, the six rapists dumped the semi-conscious friends on the roadside, five miles from where they had boarded the bus.82 Thirteen days later, Singh died from her injuries. The following year, three women set up a crowd-mapping platform called Safecity.83 Women can report the location, date and time they were harassed, as well as what happened, ‘so that others can view “hot spots” of such incidents on a map’. The data collected so far is revealing: groping is the most common type of harassment – ahead even of catcalls – and it is most likely to happen on public buses (likely because of overcrowding).
Innovative solutions like this are to be welcomed, but they are not a sufficient substitute for data collected and analysed by professional researchers. And this kind of data is severely lacking in all areas of urban planning, not just transport. A 2016 article in the Guardian asking why we aren’t designing cities ‘that work for women, not just men’ cautions that the limited number of urban datasets ‘that track and trend data on gender make it hard to develop infrastructure programmes that factor in women’s needs’.84 Even when we do start collecting data, there is no guarantee we will continue to do so indefinitely: in 2008 a UK-based database of research on gender and architecture was set up; by 2012 ‘Gendersite’ had closed for lack of funds.85 And when we don’t collect and, crucially, use sex-disaggregated data in urban design, we find unintended male bias cropping up in the most surprising of places.
Most women who use a gym will have experienced that moment of psyching herself up to walk into the free weights area, knowing that many of the men who dominate the space will regard her on a range from nuisance to freak. And yes, you can technically just walk in, but there’s that extra mental hurdle to clear that most men simply don’t face, and it takes a particular kind of self-confidence not to be bothered by it at all. Some days, you just won’t feel like it. It’s the same story in the outdoor gym in my local park; if it’s full of men, I often give it a miss, not relishing the inevitable stares and all too clear sense that I don’t belong.
The inevitable reaction from some quarters to such complaints is to tell women to stop being delicate flowers – or for feminists to stop painting women as delicate flowers. And of course some women aren’t bothered by the leering and macho posturing. But women who do avoid these spaces are not being irrational, because there are plenty of accounts of hostility from men when women venture into supposedly gender-neutral shared exercise spaces.86 Like transit environments, then, gyms are often a classic example of a male-biased public space masquerading as equal access.
The good news is that this kind of male bias can be designed out and some of the data collection has already been done. In the mid-1990s, research by local officials in Vienna found that from the age of ten, girls’ presence in parks and public playgrounds ‘decreases significantly’.87 But rather than simply shrugging their shoulders and deciding that the girls just needed to toughen up, city officials wondered if there was something wrong with the design of parks. And so they planned some pilot projects, and they started to collect data.
What they found was revealing. It turned out that single large open spaces were the problem, because these forced girls to compete with the boys for space. And girls didn’t have the confidence to compete with the boys (that’s social conditioning for you) so they tended to just let the boys have the space. But when they subdivided the parks into smaller areas, the female drop-off was reversed. They also addressed the parks’ sports facilities. Originally these spaces were encased by wire fencing on all sides, with only a single entrance area – around which groups of boys would congregate. And the girls, unwilling to run the gauntlet, simply weren’t going in. Enter, stage right, Vienna’s very own Leslie Knope, Claudia Prinz-Brandenburg, with a simple proposal: more and wider entrances.88 And like the grassy spaces, they also subdivided the sports courts. Formal sports like basketball were still provided for, but there was also now space for more informal activities – which girls are more likely to engage in. These were all subtle changes – but they worked. A year later, not only were there more girls in the park, the number of ‘informal activities’ had increased. And now all new parks in Vienna are designed along the same lines.
The city of Malmö, Sweden, discovered a similar male bias in the way they’d traditionally been planning ‘youth’ urban regeneration. The usual procedure was to create spaces for skating, climbing and painting grafitti.89 The trouble was, it wasn’t the ‘youth’ as a whole who were participating in these activities. It was almost exclusively the boys, with girls making up only 10-20% of those who used the city’s youth-directed leisure spaces and facilities. And again, rather than shrugging their shoulders and thinking there was something wrong with the girls for not wanting to use such spaces, officials turned instead to data collection.
In 2010, before they began work on their next regeneration project (converting a car park to a leisure area) city officials asked the girls what they wanted.90 The resulting area is well lit and, like the Viennese parks, split into a range of different-sized spaces on different levels.91 Since then, Christian Resebo, the official from Malmö’s traffic department who was involved in the project, tells me, ‘Two more spaces have been developed with the intention of specifically targeting girls and younger women.’
The benefits of this gender-sensitive approach won’t just be felt by girls: it may also be felt by the public purse. In the city of Gothenburg in Sweden, around 80 million kronor is distributed every year to sports clubs and associations. Of course, the funding is meant to benefit everyone equally. But when city officials examined the data, they found that it wasn’t.92 The majority of funding was going to organised sports – which are dominated by boys. Grants benefited boys over girls for thirty-six out of forty-four sports. In total, Gothenburg was spending 15 million kronor more on boys’ than girls’ sports. This didn’t just mean that girls’ sports were less well funded – sometimes they weren’t provided for at all, meaning girls had to pay to do them privately. Or, if they couldn’t afford to pay, girls didn’t do sports at all.
Most readers will be unsurprised by the report’s conclusion that the failure to invest in girls’ sport contributed to poorer mental health in girls. More unexpected, perhaps, is the claim that investing in girls’ sport could reduce the health cost of fractures due to osteoporosis. Physical exercise increases young people’s bone density, reducing the risk of osteoporosis later in life, with research suggesting it is especially important that young girls begin exercising before puberty.
The total cost to Gothenburg of the estimated 1,000 fractures a year resulting from falls (three-quarters of which are suffered by women) is around 150 million kronor. Women account for over 110 million kronor of this. As the report concludes, ‘[I]f an increase in the city’s support for girls’ sports of SEK 15 million can lead to a 14 per cent reduction in future fractures due to osteoporosis, the investment will have paid for itself.’
When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default. The reality is that half the global population has a female body. Half the global population has to deal on a daily basis with the sexualised menace that is visited on that body. The entire global population needs the care that, currently, is mainly carried out, unpaid, by women. These are not niche concerns, and if public spaces are truly to be for everyone, we have to start accounting for the lives of the other half of the world. And, as we’ve seen, this isn’t just a matter of justice: it’s also a matter of simple economics.
By accounting for women’s care responsibilities in urban planning, we make it easier for women to engage fully in the paid workforce – and as we will see in the next chapter, this is a significant driver of GDP. By accounting for the sexual violence women face and introducing preventative measures – like providing enough single-sex public toilets – we save money in the long run by reducing the significant economic cost of violence against women. When we account for female socialisation in the design of our open spaces and public activities, we again save money in the long run by ensuring women’s long-term mental and physical health.
In short, designing the female half of the world out of our public spaces is not a matter of resources. It’s a matter of priorities, and, currently, whether unthinkingly or not, we just aren’t prioritising women. This is manifestly unjust, and economically illiterate. Women have an equal right to public resources: we must stop excluding them by design.