This article is written by Caroline Torén, Founder, Refolda.

I had never thought of public transportation as a gender equality issue before I moved to Los Angeles.

I have commuted by bus and metro all my life — through Stockholm, London, and Brussels — often killing time with a book or a podcast. I didn’t pay much attention to the different needs of other riders, or the design that enabled them to travel. Despite spending a lot of my professional time working on gender equality — for example at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, where I was championing the implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda, — I had never had a conversation about the link between public transportation and gender equality.

This was also the case when I moved to L.A., where I continued to use public transit but often found it more challenging getting to work or seeing friends and family on the other side of town. But then, in my second year in the city, while I was working for the L.A. City Commission on the Status of Women, I had the opportunity to join the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority NextGen Bus Study Working Group. This group is comprised of 60+ community members helping to improve L.A. Metro’s bus system — 165 bus routes and 7 million service hours, serving a County of ten million people (equal to the size of my native Sweden’s entire population).

It was only after I joined this network and after I researched the topic on my own, that I became fully aware of women’s different mobility patterns and mobility needs, based on age, race/ethnicity, socio-economic status, disability, and other essential factors. Soon, I realised that this was an issue that needs more advocates.

Not all people are gender equality experts

Globally, data on women is limited, and so is the progress towards gender equality. We continue to read about persistent pay gaps, violence against women, the lack of women in management positions or elected office, and women’s lack of access to venture capital.

The glacial pace of change shows that we have yet to find a narrative that resonates with a larger population, as the marriage equality movement so successfully did, and which recognises, as Michael Kaufman, co-founder of the influential White Ribbon Campaign, writes, that the “gender equality revolution is also a revolution for men.”

But to be effective, we also need to build everyone’s skills to assess and respond to issues in a gender-responsive way. This is called gender mainstreaming: the process of assessing the implications for women and men, girls and boys, and members of the LGBTQ+ community of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programs, in all areas and at all levels.

Bus and train stations comprise some of the most common recruitment spots for human trafficking - a crime affecting an estimated 40.3 million people globally, 75% of which are women and girls

Around the world, organisations have committed to advancing gender equality and implementing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discriminations Against Women (CEDAW).

To accelerate this process, we must invest more in the employees who are expected to deliver on CEDAW’s principles. When policy analysts, transportation managers, service providers, city planners, communication officers, building inspectors, project managers, architects, data scientists, police officers, bus drivers, and many more, know why and how gender equality matters to their field of work, we can achieve structural change.

As we continue efforts to increase women’s representation across all levels and sectors, let’s build and improve our collective skills to apply a gender lens to the way we design, implement, and evaluate policies, programs, and services. And let’s do it in a compelling way. Scrap theories and focus on examples that everyone can relate to; personally, professionally, and at the community level. Let’s talk about gender-blind design that we experience every day and the benefits of gender equality that we don’t always think about - couples that share unpaid household work equally have more sex. Who knew? Let’s not expect colleagues to be gender equality experts, but instead build their capacity to become one.

The price women pay for transport

Just like me, many of my colleagues and friends had never looked at public transportation through an intersectional gender lens. But public transit plays a fundamental role in shaping access to education, jobs, healthcare, childcare, and other amenities.

For many women and girls, lack of safe, affordable, accessible, and frequent transit services have an isolating effect. It increases the time they spend in transit, and on domestic tasks and caregiving responsibilities, while limiting their professional opportunities, and time to connect with friends and family. And women of colour are taking the biggest toll.

Women, including teens, are responsible for 75% of the world's unpaid household and care work, and this affects how they travel. While men tend to drive to work and back, women take public transportation multiple times per day, at peak and off-peak hours. Not only to work, but to drop off children at school, take care of elder relatives, buy groceries, and more.

Women and girls also experience more harassment and physical abuse. In New York City, women’s fear for their safety and caregiving responsibilities lead to women paying a pink transit tax as they opt for ridesharing services, instead of public transit, to get home safely.

But this option is not available to everyone. Besides gender roles, basic means, employment status, driving license, and cultural values are other factors affecting one’s mobility and safety. Women and girls experiencing homelessness often seek refuge on the metro, and they have their own set of needs that must be addressed in the design of services and allocation of resources. What’s more, bus and train stations comprise some of the most common recruitment spots for human trafficking - a crime affecting an estimated 40.3 million people globally, 75% of which are women and girls.

In the NextGen Bus Study Working Group, it is becoming a standard to address issues from an intersectional gender lens. A few months into the initiative, L.A. Metro and its Women & Girls Governing Council decided to conduct a study on how women travel, and they are now developing a Gender Action Plan that will recommend policy, design and service upgrades that can improve women’s travel experiences.

Good progress is being made, and if we continue to see investments in capacity-building, we may soon have a 10,000 strong Metro workforce that knows why public transportation is a gender equality issue, and gender-responsive assessments and services will become the new normal.  — Caroline Torén

(Picture credit: Unsplash)