Moving around a city is a gender equality issue, shows global study

A new study exploring the likelihood of different genders utilising active transport options has produced some all too familiar and frustrating insights, which, when considered in tandem with gender equality economic research, serves to further highlight deep-seated social and societal barriers to development.

Oyinlola Oyebode, Associate Professor in Public Health, University of Warwick, and Rahul Goel, Visiting faculty from The Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, examined the extent to which men and women’s access to active travel varies, across 19 cities, from 13 different countries, on five different continents.

Analysing secondary data from population-representative travel surveys held across the globe, respondents where asked to report their travel activities for a day or two. The data covers feedback from Accra, Kisumu, Cape Town, Delhi, Melbourne, London, Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Munich, Zurich, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Santiago, Bogota, Mexico City, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City.

What the researchers found was that women in most of the surveyed cities achieved as much active travel time as men overall. However, the propensity to cycle showed a gulf between men and women, essentially meaning females were less able to cover longer distances via active travel means and thus had less overall access to the city at large.

With walking, public transport and cycling rates examined it was cycling that presented the greatest variation between the cities. Interestingly, it was German cities that showed the most favourable cycling conditions for women, with three in four actually having higher rates for women than men. These locations generally have better cycling infrastructure in place than the lower scoring locations, such as Cape Town which had almost no female cycling.

The authors wrote: “A lack of safe infrastructure – from off-road paths or protected bike lanes – goes some way to explaining why women are less likely to use a bike. Research suggests that they may be generally more risk averse than men. The German cities in our study demonstrate that this can be changed given their higher rates of overall cycling and little gender inequality.”

Oyebode and Goel found that women are half as likely as men to cycle overall. Separate studies building in gender equality data have concluded that both men and women are more likely to cycle where safe infrastructure exists, though the availability of such paths is often found to be a greater factor in choice to cycle among women.

CI.N’s own annual studies have consecutively found that bike shop’s perceive lack of safe cycling infrastructure as the leading barrier to making more bike sales with customers new or returning to cycling.

Critical to highlight and not overlooked by the study authors, these gendered differences have consequences for everyone in the city. Where greater active travel rates exist there has often been noted a reduction in air pollution and dangerous greenhouse gases, which has a societal benefit to everyone. In the City of London the sentiment toward active travel warmed upon the discovery that dangerous particulates declined by more than a third on the back of temporary provision for cyclists.

To read the full article, with multiple linked reference sources, as featured in The Conversation, click here.

To explore how bike share schemes have been shown to help drive gender parity in cycling read more here.