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

by Caroline Criado Perez

  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.

  PART II

  The Workplace

  CHAPTER 3

  The Long Friday

  By the end of the day, 24 October 1975 came to be known by Icelandic men as ‘the long Friday’.1 Supermarkets sold out of sausages – ‘the favourite ready meal of the time’. Offices were suddenly flooded with children hopped up on the sweets they had been bribed with in a
n effort to make them behave. Schools, nurseries, fish factories all either shut down or ran at reduced capacity. And the women? Well, the women were having a Day Off.

  1975 had been declared by the UN as a Women’s Year, and in Iceland women were determined to make it count. A committee was set up with representatives from Iceland’s five biggest women’s organisations. After some discussion they came up with the idea of a strike. On 24 October, no woman in Iceland would do a lick of work. No paid work, but also no cooking, no cleaning, no child care. Let the men of Iceland see how they coped without the invisible work women did every day to keep the country moving.

  Ninety per cent of Icelandic women took part in the strike. Twenty-five thousand women gathered for a rally (the largest of more than twenty to take place throughout the country) in Reykjavík’s Downtown Square – a staggering figure in a country of then only 220,000 people.2 A year later, in 1976, Iceland passed the Gender Equality Act, which outlawed sex discrimination in workplaces and schools.3 Five years later, Vigdís Finnbogadòttir beat three men to become the world’s first democratically elected female head of state. And today, Iceland has the most gender-equal parliament in the world without a quota system.4 In 2017 the country topped the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index for the eighth year running.5

  Iceland has also been named by The Economist as the best country to be a working woman.6 And while this is of course something to celebrate, there is also reason to take issue with The Economist’s phrasing, because if Iceland’s strike does anything it is surely to expose the term ‘working woman’ as a tautology. There is no such thing as a woman who doesn’t work. There is only a woman who isn’t paid for her work.

  Globally, 75% of unpaid work is done by women,7 who spend between three and six hours per day on it compared to men’s average of thirty minutes to two hours.8 This imbalance starts early (girls as young as five do significantly more household chores than their brothers) and increases as they get older. Even in the country with the highest male unpaid working time (Denmark), men still spend less time on unpaid work than women in the country with the lowest female unpaid working time, Norway.9