Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

by Caroline Criado Perez

  While much of the historical gender data gap in travel planning has arisen simply because the idea that women might have different needs didn’t occur to the (mainly) male planners, there is another, less excusable, reason for it, and that is that women are seen as, well, just more difficult to measure. ‘Women have much more complicated travel patterns,’ explains Sánchez de Madariaga, who has designed a survey to measure women’s care travel. And on the whole, transport authorities aren’t interested in women’s ‘atypical’ travel habits. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, tells me that ‘oftentimes there is the perception from the part of transit operators that everyone has universal needs. Men, women, everything is the same. And this is completely untrue.’ She laughs in exasperation. ‘Talking to women riders they bring up a whole slew of different needs that are not being taken care of.’

  To make matters worse, transport authorities are compounding the existing gender data gap by failing to separate the data they do have by sex. The annual transport statistics report37 created by the UK government’s Department of Transport includes a single statistic (on the gender breakdown of driving-test pass rates – in 2015/16 44% of women passed versus 51% of men), and a link to a page on a government website that hosts a report on gender and walking. The report has nothing to say on the gender breakdown of bus or rail usage, for example, even though this information is vital for planning a transport system that properly serves all its users.

  India’s public transport agencies also don’t separate their data by sex,38 while a recent EU report bemoaned the paucity of gender-sensitive transport data, explaining that ‘this kind of data is not collected on a regular basis in the majority of European countries.’39 As in the UK, the US’s Transport Statistics Annual Report only mentions women twice: once in relation to driving licences and once in relation to walking.40 Unlike the UK, however, these references are not even presented as usable statistics, just generalised statements.

  A more hidden data gap comes courtesy of the way transport agencies around the world present their data. On the whole, all travel for paid work is grouped together into one single category, but care work is subdivided into smaller categories, some of which, like ‘shopping’, aren’t distinguished from leisure. This is failing to sex-disaggregate by proxy. When Sánchez de Madariaga collected care-related travel data in Madrid, she found that the number of trips made for caring purposes almost equalled those made for employment purposes. And when she further refined the data by sex-disaggregating it, she found that care was ‘the single and foremost purpose of travel for women, in much the same way as employment is the main purpose of men’s travel’. If all travel surveys were to do this, she argues, planners would be forced to take care travel as seriously as employment travel.

  If we really want to start designing transport systems that serve women as well as men, it’s no good designing transport infrastructure in isolation, cautions Sánchez de Madariaga, because women’s mobility is also an issue of overarching planning policy: specifically, the creation of ‘mixed use’ areas. And mixed-use areas fly in the face of traditional planning norms that, in many countries, legally divide cities into commercial, residential and industrial single-use areas, a practice that is called zoning.

  Zoning dates back to antiquity (what was allowed on either side of the city walls, for example), but it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that we started to see the kind of explicit division of what could be built where that legally separated where you live from where you might work. And, with its oversimplified categories, this kind of zoning has woven a male bias into the fabric of cities around the world.

  Zoning laws are based on, and prioritise the needs of, a bread-winning heterosexual married man who goes off to work in the morning, and comes home to the suburbs to relax at night. This is, explains Sánchez de Madariaga, ‘the personal reality of most decision-makers in the field’, and the idea that the home is mostly a place for leisure ‘continues to underpin planning practices throughout the world.’41

  But if for these decision-makers the home is ‘a respite from paid labour’ and ‘a place for leisure’, that is far from its role in most women’s lives. Globally women do three times the amount of unpaid care work men do;42 according to the IMF, this can be further subdivided into twice as much childcare and four times as much housework.43 In Katebe, a town in central Uganda, the World Bank found that after spending nearly fifteen hours on a combination of housework, childcare, digging, preparing food, collecting fuel and water, women were unsurprisingly left with only around thirty minutes of leisure time per day.44 By contrast, men, who spent an hour less than women per day digging, negligible amounts of time on housework and childcare, and no time at all on collecting fuel and water, managed to find about four hours per day to spend on leisure. The home may have been a place of leisure for him – but for her? Not so much.

  In any case, in most families both parents work, and with women in heterosexual couples being the most likely to have primary caring responsibilities over children and elderly relatives, the legal separation of the home from formal workplaces can make life incredibly difficult. Those who have to accompany children and sick relatives around the peripheries of an urban area poorly served by public transport infrastructure are forgotten. The truth is that most zoning ordinances do not reflect women’s lives (or even many men’s lives).

  The impact of the kind of lazy unthinking that positions the home as a place of leisure can be severe. In 2009, Brazil launched a public housing scheme called Minha Casa, Minha Vida (My House, My Life). The plan was to help those (at the time an estimated 50 million people) living in inadequate housing.45 It hasn’t exactly worked out that way.

  The stereotypical image of Brazil’s favelas is one of substandard slums, of crime-ridden areas of poverty and lawlessness, where cowed residents live in fear of prowling gangs. There is a grain of truth to this stereotype, but for many favela residents, the reality is very different, and the homes they live in are simply the community-built social housing the state has failed to provide. They have grown in response to need, and are generally located in convenient locations, for both work and transport.

  The same cannot be said for the Minha Casa, Minha Vida (MCMV) complexes, which have mostly been built on the far edges of the West Zone, an area which in 2010 was described by Antônio Augusto Veríssimo, director of Rio’s housing ministry, as a ‘região dormitório’, a dormant region, because of its lack of jobs.46 In fact, Veríssimo discouraged the building of public housing in this area, for fear of creating ‘mais guetos de pobreza’ – more ghettos of poverty. Research from the London School of Economics has also found that the majority of those who have been resettled have been moved much further from their original homes than the 7 km distance allowed under municipal law.47

  Luisa, forty-two, used to live in a favela in Rio’s wealthy South Zone, where, along with the Central and North Zones, the majority of jobs in Rio are to be found. ‘I walked out of my door and was practically already at work,’ she told a researcher for the Heinrich Böll Foundation.48 ‘There was transportation going everywhere. I didn’t have to walk for miles just to get to a bus stop.’ She now lives in an MCMV condo in Campo Grande, in Rio’s underdeveloped West Zone, more than 50 km away from her old home.

  With no jobs in the immediate vicinity, residents must travel up to three hours to the North and Central Zones using a transport infrastructure that can be described as limited at best. Over 60% of the new housing units are a thirty-minute walk from the nearest train or metro.49 And the failure to provide adequate public transport for those relocated from the centre to the outskirts of Rio impacts on women in particular because Rio follows the global trend of men dominating car ownership: 71% of cars are owned by men, and men are twice as likely as women to travel using individual vehicles.50

  It also particularly impacts on women because of their unpaid care-work responsibilities. Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia
, a researcher at LSE, told me about the panic of a woman she interviewed who had just been told that she was being moved to an MCMV complex. Pregnant and already a mother of two, she was only able to work because she could rely on her mother for childcare. Being moved 70 km away from her mother and her workplace would make keeping her job impossible. And in the new MCMV complexes what little childcare provision exists has ‘not been renovated or expanded to attend to the new residents’.51

  The failure to provide childcare is exacerbated by the design of the government’s new complexes. The apartments themselves have been designed for traditional nuclear families – but the nuclear family is by no means the standard family unit in a favela. ‘It’s very rare that you go into a home in a favela and there aren’t three generations living there,’ says Dr Theresa Williamson, a Rio-based urban planning expert, adding that she’s ‘never seen an elderly person living on their own in a favela’. Similarly, the majority of the households Arrigoitia interviewed were single mothers, often with both children and an older parent living with them. But the standardised design of these ‘super tiny’ housing units ‘didn’t respond at all to the potential variety of families’, and a side effect is that the childcare solution that intergenerational favela living often provides has been excluded from the new complexes by design.

  As for public space in the MCMV complexes, this is more or less limited to ‘huge car parks’, despite the fact that very few people have cars, and ‘horribly maintained playgrounds’ with equipment that is so cheap it is destroyed within a couple of months (and not replaced). The complexes seem designed with privacy rather than community in mind. For the families used to the intimacy of the favela where, explains Williamson, ‘your kid doesn’t necessarily even need childcare after a certain age, because everybody is always watching them’, this often translates into isolation and fear of crime. The upshot is that ‘kids aren’t outside as much, they stay in their apartments’. And ‘suddenly women do need to be watching their kids in a way they didn’t used to in the favela’. Suddenly they need childcare. And they don’t have any.

  This isn’t even an issue of resources. It’s an issue of priorities. Brazil spent millions on public transport infrastructure in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. The money was there, it was just being spent elsewhere. LSE Cities research found that the new Bus Rapid Transit corridors tended to privilege areas where Olympic facilities were located, leaving ‘the problem of collective transport between the poorer resettlements and downtown [. . .] unattended’.52 Furthermore, according to residents, government relocation priorities seemed to be less about helping those who needed better housing and more about making way for the upcoming World Cup and Olympics infrastructure development.

  And so the women pay. Cristine Santos lost her job in a market in Nova Iguaçu after she was moved to the Vivenda Das Patativas complex in Campo Grande. ‘I had to take three buses,’ she explained.53 Another woman was so exhausted from her daily commute of up to six hours, that she had a near-fatal car accident.54 With few other options open to them women have taken to setting up shop in their new homes, selling drinks, preparing lunch plates, cutting people’s hair. But they have to do it in the knowledge that it could get them evicted, because in doing so they are flouting zoning regulations. Turning your home into your workplace is an option in favela living because there are no zoning regulations in place: the whole area is already technically illegal. This is not the case with the government’s public housing, where, being a residential zone, running a business from your home is strictly forbidden.

  So, to sum up, the Brazilian government moved women away from the formal workplace (and indeed the informal workplace: women dominate Brazil’s 7.2 million domestic workers) and provided them with inadequate public transport and no childcare.55 In so doing, they practically forced women to turn their homes into their workplace, by making this the one option that is realistically open to them. And they’ve made it illegal.

  Public housing doesn’t have to be this way: but the alternative does require thought. When Vienna’s public officials decided to build a new housing complex in 1993, they first defined ‘the needs of the people using the space’ and then looked for technical solutions to meet those needs, explains Eva Kail.56 What this meant was collecting data, specifically sex-disaggregated data, because the ‘people’ this housing was intended to serve were women.

  Surveys compiled at the time by Austria’s national statistics agency revealed that women spent more time per day than men on household chores and childcare.57 (According to the latest World Economic Forum figures Austrian women spend double the time men spend on unpaid work, and more time overall on paid and unpaid work combined.)58 And so, explains Kail, officials designed the housing complex Frauen-Werk-Stadt I (Women-Work-City I – there has since been a II and a III) to cater for women’s caring needs.

  First came the location, which, Kail says, was carefully chosen to make it easier for women to carry out their caring responsibilities. The complex is right next to a tram stop, has a kindergarten on-site and is close to schools, meaning children can travel on their own from an early age (Sánchez de Madariaga tells me that one of the biggest time drains for women is ‘escorting kids to school, to doctors, and to extracurricular activities’). A doctor’s practice, a pharmacy and commercial space for other shops are all included within the complex, and there is a large supermarket nearby. It is the ultimate in mixed-use design.

  The design of FWS I is, in fact, rather like a purpose-built favela. It prioritises community and shared space. Interconnected buildings with a maximum of four units per floor stand around a series of shared courtyards (complete with grassy areas and children’s play spaces) which are visible from any unit in the project. Meanwhile, transparent stairwells visible to the outdoors, high levels of lighting in public spaces, and well-lit car parking accessible only via flats, were all designed to promote a sense of safety.59 Another housing complex in Vienna (Autofriere Mustersiedlung) dispensed with parking spaces altogether, bypassing the zoning rule that specifies one car parking space per new apartment.60 They instead spent the money on communal rooms and additional play areas. The complex was not specifically aimed at women, but given women are less likely to drive and more likely to care for children than men, the outcome is nevertheless one that caters to women’s housing and care needs.

  Care work is also built into the interior of the open-floor plan FWS I flats. The kitchen is at the heart of each flat, its visible lines of sight to the rest of the home mirroring the outer courtyard design. This not only enables women to keep an eye on children while working in the kitchen, it also places housework at the heart of the house: a subtle challenge to the idea that housework is solely a woman’s responsibility. Compare this to the tendency a local official in Philadelphia revealed she had to repeatedly check in developers of putting kitchens up on a third floor with no elevator: ‘Do you want to carry your groceries and strollers up to the third floor?’ she points out.61

  CHAPTER 2

  Gender Neutral With Urinals

  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.