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

public spaces. In fact, they are around twice as likely to be scared as men. And, rather unusually, we have the data to prove it. ‘Crime surveys and empirical studies from different parts of the world show that a majority of women are fearful of the potential violence against them when in public spaces,’ explains urban-planning professor Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris. Analyses of crime data from the US and Sweden both show that women and men respond to similar environmental conditions differently, with women tending to be ‘more sensitive than men to signs of danger and social disorder, graffiti, and unkempt and abandoned buildings’.

A UK Department for Transport study highlighted the stark difference between male and female perceptions of danger, finding that 62% of women are scared walking in multistorey car parks, 60% are scared waiting on train platforms, 49% are scared waiting at the bus stop, and 59% are scared walking home from a bus stop or station. The figures for men are 31%, 25%, 20% and 25%, respectively.³³ Fear of crime is particularly high among low-income women, partly because they tend to live in areas with higher crime rates, but also because they are likely to be working odd hours³⁴ and often come home from work in the dark.³⁵ Ethnic-minority women tend to experience more fear for the same reasons, as well as having the added danger of (often gendered) racialised violence to contend with.

This fear impacts on women’s mobility and their basic right of access to the city.³⁶ Studies from Finland, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Taiwan and the UK all show that women adjust their behaviour and their travel patterns to accommodate this fear.³⁷ They avoid specific routes, times and modes of transport. They avoid travelling at night. In one Canadian study exactly half of the women surveyed ‘indicated that fear prevents them from using public transportation or parking garages’³⁸ and studies from around the world find that fear of crime is ‘amongst the most important reasons women choose not to use public transport’.³⁹ If they can afford to, they choose to drive or take a taxi instead.

The trouble is, many of them can’t afford to. Most passengers are ‘transit captives’, meaning that they have no reasonable means other than public transport to get from one place to another.⁴⁰ This lack of choice particularly affects low-income women, and those living in the global south – in India, for example, women have limited access⁴¹ to private transport and therefore rely on public transport to a far greater extent than men.⁴² These women adopt strategies such as taking a longer roundabout route or only travelling while accompanied. Some women go as far as quitting their jobs – a solution that is not limited to those on low incomes.⁴³ When I tweeted about women’s experiences of harassment on public transport, one man replied to tell me about ‘a very intelligent and capable woman’ he knows, who ‘gave up a really good job in the City and moved out of London because she hated being groped on the Tube’.

Clearly, there is an injustice here. But all too often the blame is put on women themselves for feeling fearful, rather than on planners for designing urban spaces and transit environments that make them feel unsafe. And, as usual, the gender data gap is behind it all. The official statistics show that men are in fact more likely to be victims of crime in public spaces, including public transport. And this paradox, says Loukaitou-Sideris, ‘has led to the conclusion that women’s fear of crime is irrational and more of a problem than crime itself’. But, she points out, the official statistics do not tell the whole story.

As women navigate public spaces, they are also navigating a slew of threatening sexual behaviours. Before we even get to the more serious offences like being assaulted, women are dealing on a daily basis with behaviours from men that make – and are often calculated to make – them feel uncomfortable. Ranging from catcalling, to being leered at, to the use of ‘sexualised slurs [and] requests for someone’s name’, none of these behaviours is criminal exactly, but they all add up to a feeling of sexual menace.⁴⁴ A feeling of being watched. Of being in danger – and in fact these behaviours can easily escalate. Enough women have experienced the sharp shift from ‘Smile, love, it might never happen,’ to ‘Fuck you bitch why are you ignoring me?’ to being followed home and assaulted, to know that an ‘innocent’ comment from a male stranger can be anything but.

But women don’t report these behaviours, because who could they report them to? Until the emergence of groups like ‘EverydaySexism’ and ‘Hollaback’, which give women a space in which they can talk about the intimidating-but-just-short-of-criminal behaviours they face in public spaces on a daily basis, public awareness of this behaviour was more or less non-existent. When police in Nottingham started recording misogynistic behaviour (everything from indecent exposure, to groping, to upskirting) as a hate crime (or if the behaviour was not strictly criminal, a hate incident), they found reports shot up – not because men had suddenly got much worse, but because women felt that they would be taken seriously.⁴⁵

The invisibility of the threatening behaviour women face in public is compounded by the reality that men don’t do this to women who are accompanied by other men – who are in any case also much less likely to experience this kind of behaviour. A recent Brazilian survey found that two-thirds of women had been victims of sexual harassment and violence while in transit, half of them on public transportation. The proportion among men was 18%.⁴⁶ So men who didn’t do it and didn’t experience it simply didn’t know it was going on. And they all too often dismissed women who told them about it with an airy ‘Well I’ve never seen it.’ Another gender data gap.

And one that is exacerbated by how we collect the data. ‘Large-scale data for the prevalence