Transport for women: who decides what women need?

Cities should serve all. Yet, traditional transport planning has historically overlooked how women move within cities. Earlier investigations into women’s transport issues have pointed out the general trends in how women and men travel emphasising the differences in trip duration, trip purposes and transport modes used. Many scholars and practitioners have therefore argued for inclusive planning that addresses the varied needs of citizens. The seminal papers by Robin Law and Susan Hanson published in 1999 and 2010, respectively, synthesised an extensive base of empirical evidence on women’s issues in transport and offered useful conceptual recommendations (Hanson, 2010; Law, 1999). They highlighted the importance of using gender as a means to structure social relations, and the importance of institutions, culture and personal agency in women’s mobility patterns. Using gender as a social category is especially critical, as it enables a bringing together of all gender groups as well as incorporating other types of social categories, such as race and class, into the understanding of how women move around. Overall, there is ample evidence that it is who we are and what we do that determines how we travel around in cities and eventually our mobility needs.

But what are these needs, and who identifies them? How do women’s mobility needs differ from those of men? How do other dimensions of who we are differentiate these needs further? Should planning follow these widely held beliefs? In this editorial, I argue that it is now time to question how these seemingly obvious needs are constructed.

Despite the vast empirical evidence on the complexity of the topic, one particular example that often pops up in discussions on women’s transport needs is the issue of women having to use prams, and this is usually presented in the context of defending women’s right to mobility. This is a very simple example appearing mostly in Western context, but it clearly demonstrates how women are depicted in policy and planning on the basis of widely held social roles of women. Embracing these long-held beliefs about what women do in everyday life perpetuates unequal social roles and the distribution of responsibilities. Incorporating the presumed gender roles into transport planning without questioning is likely to bury the real problem.

We are entrenched in or relieved by wider structural and cultural factors that define individual needs in a broader sense, and they are not necessarily based on women’s choices. The intertwined nature of the everyday becomes more evident when loosening the presumptions of what women do and eventually what they need. The increasingly blurry divide between everyday spaces of women, especially those concerning work and family, shows that transport policy is extremely interwoven with the broader policies, such as social and industrial policies that drive structural inequalities. Indeed, it has long been established that safety issues and access to jobs are particularly relevant to women’s mobility experience and needs (Hanson, 2010). However, our understanding of how structural inequalities play a role in determining this complex web of interdependencies has not attracted adequate attention. Work and employment practices especially interfere with women’s time, transport choices and even household roles. For instance, urban congestion due to floods in Manila has been considered in some places as simply an issue emerging from unmet transport needs only for the low-income women, whilst the harsh workplace rules concerning being late to work has significant implications for women’s economic wellbeing (Akyelken, 2020).

Apart from the structural factors, culture also strongly resonates with how people move, particularly determining symbolic meanings of bodily movements. Being on the move is an embodied experience. The embodied nature of mobility is evident in the use of public transport and active travel, and the associated needs for women. But culture also carries wider connotations such as social class and how this is reflected in mobility patterns. For example, recent research has shown that a female cleaner in Istanbul is asked to clean their feet before going into the house she works at as her shoes must be dirty due to her using public transport and walking (Beyazıt & Süngür, 2018). Associating women’s social status with a certain form of transport has intricate implications for what this group of women really need in terms of improving their mobility and their social wellbeing.

The implications of women’s mobility experiences for wider national policies and their cultural drivers are important factors in establishing transport needs of women. Transport is part of a larger set of unfair policy decisions with respect to gender and social class. We should, therefore, be able to distinguish transport issues from non-transport issues. Treating a structural gender inequality through transport planning only will normalise the negative impacts of unjust policies or presumptions on women. Instead of applying general trends such as women travelling in certain ways, decision-makers should turn to more sensitive local knowledge, which would entail participatory research. Furthermore, having women from diverse social backgrounds in leadership positions in the transport policy and industry is also likely to avoid generalisations about women’s transport needs. To elucidate further the broader gender issues, women’s issues should be considered across different policy realms before tackling them with transport planning. In sum, a universal gender-based transport planning based on issues emerging from structural injustice may exacerbate the problems by accepting the inequalities as a norm. Women are at the centre of the economy with their paid and unpaid work, and their complex needs require a much more detailed understanding so that their right to mobility in cities can be established.