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

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