Mind the Gender Gap

By Meghna Khanna, AICP

Does your city's comprehensive plan account for the needs of women?

More than 300 local governments were asked this question as part of a 2014 survey conducted by APA's Planning and Women Division and the Women's Planning Forum of Cornell University to determine whether gender differences factor into local planning decisions in the U.S. The answer, according to an overwhelming majority (98 percent), was no.

These results illustrate what a growing number of planning experts say is a clear and persistent gender gap in the way our cities — largely planned by men — are designed.

"Much attention is rightly paid to how racial and ethnic minorities and low-income households do or do not participate in shaping the future of their communities. Less attention has been paid to uneven planning processes and outcomes by gender," Sherry Ryan writes in a recent PAS Memo, "Integrating Gender Mainstreaming into U.S. Planning Practice." This is despite the fact that "men and women have different wants and needs when it comes to built environments, public services, and amenities, and that planning interventions may not meet all those different needs, especially those of women."

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The gap is particularly glaring when it comes to public transportation. In the U.S., women account for more than half of all transit ridership, yet their travel patterns and preferences have rarely been accounted for in planning efforts — or even measured.

"Transportation is often where the urban planning gender divide becomes most apparent, as mobility solutions in our cities are designed for the male and able-bodied, resulting in a lot of emphasis on personal, motorized mobility," says Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Mobility has a huge impact on the way people interact in and with our communities. By failing to provide women with reliable, convenient, safe, and affordable transportation, cities reduce the economic opportunities of women and negatively impact their quality of life.

Internationally, some South American and European cities are leading a movement called gender mainstreaming, a practice that assesses how planning and policy decisions affect different genders. But while the concept was first introduced and accepted by the United Nations more than two decades ago, it has been slow to catch on, particularly in the U.S.

Fortunately, a number of new studies, including a groundbreaking effort from Los Angeles, are starting to fill in gaps in gender-differentiated data — and building a framework for successful gender mainstreaming in transportation planning.

Gender roles and mobility

Historically, mobility has looked different for men and women due to traditional gender roles. Most men were in the paid labor force, while most women were not.

"'A woman's place is in the home' has been one of the most important principles in architectural design and urban planning in the United States for the last century," urban planner historian Dolores Hayden writes in What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like?

"Most cities were built in such a way that men could go out and work, while women stayed home to look after the kids," she writes. "Coming home was a respite for men, so it was preferred that homes were separate from work altogether, especially since many of the jobs were in dirty or polluted industries."

That meant zoning replaced the suburban potential for mixed-used developments and the traditional street grid with meandering, isolated residential streets lined with single-family houses, miles from stores and businesses. In cities, public transit systems were built by and for the male workforce's typical nine-to-five rush hour commute.

In the decades since, we've seen a significant increase of women in the paid labor force: from around 18.4 million in 1950 to 73.5 million in 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Still, lingering institutionalized gender roles mean their travel patterns continue to differ from men's.

Women spend significantly more time than men on household management and caregiving tasks. Worldwide, they dedicate an average of 4.5 hours a day to unpaid work, much of which occurs outside the home, like grocery shopping. That's more than double the amount of time men spend, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Faced with heavier family responsibilities, women statistically tend to take jobs closer to home, or find employment in service sectors like health care, education, catering, and cleaning, with positions that are part-time, with irregular working hours, or for lower pay. A recent report from the National Women's Law Center found that women account for about two-thirds of low-wage workers in the U.S., despite making up less than half the overall paid labor force.

According to Loukaitou-Sideris of UCLA, these factors contribute to women being the predominate mass transit users across the globe. "Women are captive transit users. If there is one car in the family, it is often driven by the man in the household. Taking a taxi is often too expensive to be an option. For many of these women, public transit is the only transportation mode," she says.

Women tend to bear outsized burdens and risks in the course of their daily travel as they navigate transportation networks to get to school, to work, and to run errands for and with their families.

Much of their transit usage occurs during off-peak services times, when trains and buses run infrequently or eliminate service altogether, and they are often transporting strollers, wheelchairs, and groceries on infrastructure that does not accommodate such items.

So what's being done?

A handful of cities are working to close the gender gap in transportation planning by determining how women use transit and how it can better accommodate those needs. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro), my employer, is the first transit agency in the U.S. to gather and analyze gender-differentiated statistics.

Last year, LA Metro published Understanding How Women Travel (UHWT), a study with quantitative and qualitative data from a variety of sources, including a survey completed by 2,600 residents; pop-up engagements at key rail stations; and workshops with loyal riders women who are immigrants, have disabilities, and are experiencing homelessness.

Our core findings revealed that women use transit more often each day than men, but make shorter trips: potentially driven by workforce participation rates, location of employment opportunities, and household-serving trips that tend to be more localized. Additionally, women are more frequently responsible for the mobility of other family members, particularly children and aging relatives, requiring women to spend more money on fares and find ways to accommodate strollers, small children, and wheelchairs.

Women are also more likely to trip-chain, or tie together small trips into a larger journey plan. In many cases, this can restrict or even prevent the use of public transportation: These complex, nonwork-related trips often occur during off-peak hours, in areas that might not be easily reached by rail or bus routes designed for commuters.

Our findings join a steadily accumulating collection of gender-differentiated data from other cities that have gone a step further and implemented changes based on the information. In Vienna, Austria — an early pioneer of gender mainstreaming — officials distributed a questionnaire about how city residents used transportation in 1999. The men filled it out in five minutes: They went to work in the morning, then came home at night.

But the women couldn't stop writing: about dropping the kids off at school on the way to work, or taking them to the doctor some mornings, or helping their own aging parents buy groceries, or picking the kids up from activities. As a result, Vienna instituted some small but significant changes to the city's infrastructure: wider pavements, ramps for strollers, lighting for safety.

Similarly, in 2012, Transport for London (TfL) used surveys and other engagement strategies to assess women's and girls' travel patterns. Based on the feedback, TfL now offers free travel for passengers under the age of 16 and fare capping to account for trip-chaining. The agency has also outfitted transit stations with ramps and elevators to better support women with strollers, wheelchairs, and other factors that might result in access barriers.

The UHWT study is only the first step in LA Metro's process to better understand and better serve the needs and preferences of female riders. Next comes a Gender Action Plan, which aims to ensure that LA Metro's policies, programs, and activities include a gender perspective. The findings could inform adjustments to LA Metro's fare policy to make it more equitable toward women and more cost-competitive with driving and carpooling; the way transit vehicles, rail stations, and bus stops are designed; and new service offerings that meet mid-day peak travel demands and provide better direct connections over long distances while minimizing transfers.

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Spotlight on safety

Further compounding women's access barriers to public transportation is the issue of safety. According to the LA Metro's UHWT study, 20 percent of women bus and rail riders reported experiencing sexual harassment in the past six months. And while 60 percent of female riders feel safe riding Metro during the day, that number plummets to 20 percent at night. Similarly, a 2018 study from the New York University's Rudin Center for Transportation estimated that safety threats cost women around $26 to $50 per month in changed behavior, including avoiding the use of public transportation at night.

To make transit safer, the report recommends creating better monitoring and reporting tools for riders, along with involving women in the design of transit stops to make them safer from the start.

Some transit agencies have started this work. Recently Buenos Aires, Quito, and Santiago joined forces in a push to make transit safer and more gender inclusive. The effort resulted in the 2019 FIA Foundation and CAF Development Bank survey, Ella se mueve segura. Un estudio sobre la seguridad personal de las mujeres y el transporte público en tres ciudades de América Latina, which found that at least 60 percent of women across the three cities reported feeling unsafe on public transit. The joint effort allowed the cities to share their results, challenges, and solutions, resulting in the creation of stricter laws to prevent and punish harassment, plus infrastructure changes, like installing predominately glass bus stops to eliminate blind spots.

In Toronto, the Transit Commission's Request Stop program improves rider safety by allowing woman traveling between the hours of 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. to be let off between stops closer to their destination. The agency has also expanded the program to protect other potentially vulnerable groups, including the elderly, youths, the disabled, people of color, and queer people.

London is leading all global cities in understanding and operationalizing gendered mobility differences and launching major antiharassment initiatives. The London Underground and the Docklands Light Railway have added an extra 200 British Transport Police (BTP) officers to address women's safety concerns.

And through a joint initiative with BTP and other area police departments, TfL launched a public awareness campaign in 2013 called Project Guardian that used social media to raise awareness of the rampant problem. The Twitter hashtag #ProjGuardian illustrates clearly that experiences of sexual harassment are not a rarity or a one-off. Thousands of women are sharing their stories, all of them demonstrating that this has become an accepted part of our experiences as women in public. Such efforts are particularly timely given the increased attention to sexual harassment in the #MeToo era.

Because incidents are found to be widely under-reported, the program also instituted a confidential hotline and text-message service to encourage victims and witnesses to come forward. The following year, BTP reported a 21 percent increase in sexual harassment — which meant that more people were reporting crimes, and more perpetrators were being held accountable.

"Women's stories of harassment and assault have upended the way that we think about public space, including the space that we share on trains, buses, and sidewalks," says LA Metro's UHWT report. "In holding ourselves responsible for those transportation spaces, we redefine what an inclusive mobility network could look like in the future."

Meghna Khanna is a senior director with the Countywide Planning & Development Department at LA Metro. She served on LA Metro's Women & Girls Governing Council as the leader of the Service Provider Group and co-led the Understanding How Women Travel study.