WOMEN MOVE DIFFERENTLY (and what everyone working in mobility should understand)

Understanding women’s experiences of using a male- oriented mobility system can help improve it for everyone.  Here’s a guide:

1. Mobility is not gender neutral, and may have a male bias.
2. Women have different needs and behaviours when it comes to transportation.
3. Understanding their perspective could improve mobility for everyone.

As multiple studies have shown, women have different patterns, needs and behaviours. Female mobility is characterized by trip-chaining and time poverty. The main reasons for this are that women do 75% of the world’s unpaid care work, the gender pay gap, and women’s physical condition. Women have a smaller range when traveling the same amount of time. Women carry luggage and accompany people, more often on public transport and by foot. The car is less often the default solution.

THE WORLD CLIMATE EMERGENCY IS A MAN’S JOB (Apparently)

Ladies, males and independent thinkers:  Do  you notice anything in particular in the following  sequence of images of a hugely important challenge for our planet, or at least the species? Let’s say, some kind of pattern as you move from scene to scene? Or, better yet, some kind of weird, insistent, let’s go so far as to say sick pattern?

The following set of a handful of images offers a pretty fair overview of the so-called ‘manning table’ for this particular mission, i.e., saving the planet.  

 

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Archives: Reykjavík Mobility Parade On Car-Free Day

Article by Ms. Lea Müller, appearing in the Reykjavik Grapevine of Sept 19, 2019.  The article is presented here below, and followed by historical background information and context on the Car Free Days phenomenon in which the city of Reykjavik and Iceland turned out to play a key  historic role.

September 19, 2019, Reykjavik

To celebrate the annual Car-Free Day in Iceland, some of the main roads will be closed in the Reykjavík city centre this Sunday, September 22nd. The Reykjavík Mobility Parade will start at 13:00 and move through Miklubraut and Hringbraut to Lækjartorg, where festivities will take place.

Starting in 1996, the Car-Free movement has a long history in Iceland. The idea originated from the Accessible Cities Conference held in Spain two years prior to Iceland’s first festivity and the event has significantly grown in size since. Its main objectives are to promote public transport, bikes and walking and give people a chance to reflect on motorisation and how traffic can be improved in cities.

Women in transport: Reducing inequalities in smart mobility in Europe

Andree Woodcock, a Professor from Coventry University, tells us what we need to know about the H2020 TInnGO (Transport Innovation Gender Observatory) project that concerns the role of women in transport and the need to reduce inequalities in smart mobility.  Source: Source: https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/reducing-inequalities-in-smart-mobility/73408/

Why is this needed?

It has long been recognised that women (and other groups) are significantly marginalised in transport. Without research in this area, the transport revolution produced by smart mobility will continue to exclude women and ‘disadvantaged‘ groups (e.g. the elderly, those from lower-income backgrounds, with mobility, cognitive, sensory and communication difficulties). Commuting journeys are privileged by transport systems, over those related to home and social and healthcare. The complex, multilegged journeys by women and those in lower socio-economic groups are not modelled; therefore, future systems will perpetuate the same inequalities.

Recent analysis conducted by TInnGO shows that around 70% of the transport workforce are male and since 1945, only 7% of the transport ministers in TInnGO countries have been female. Gendered and non-inclusive discourses are already being used to promote smart mobility solutions, despite the fact that women most use and support sustainable transport. Clearly, this situation needs to be urgently addressed if the smart city agenda is to fulfil its promises of improving the quality of life for all people.

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Article continues: – https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/reducing-inequalities-in-smart-mobility/73408/

Iceland’s Prime Minister Talks Climate Change and Gender Equality

Sometimes it can be an advantage to be small. You can do things bigger and faster.

Icelandic Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir in an interview of 25 July 2019 with Ciara Nugent  of Time Magazine. See  https://time.com/5634790/iceland-prime-minister-climate-change-interview/ for full text. (Thank you Ciara and Time for these extracts .)

One of the only government heads from an environmentalist party, Jakobsdottir wants to make the country a leader in climate action too, with an ambitious plan to make Iceland carbon neutral by 2040, 10 years before the target set for Iceland’s neighbors in the E.U. “It can be an advantage to be small,” she says. “You can do things bigger and faster. You can actually change everything in a very short time.”

Neyðarloftslag / hreyfanleiki / áætlun um heimsgötur

The total contents of World Streets since founding in 2008 are of course also easily available in Icelandic — for those three or four Icelanders who are not totally at ease in English .  All they would have to do is call up https://worldstreets.wordpress.com/ and then hit the language link you can see here at top right.  Og burt þú ferð.

1998. COP 4. Comfortably installed at the Head Table in Buenos Aires

And comfortably installed at the head table in Buenos Aires in 1998. BAU

Notice anything in particular here?  Exception, or rule?

Hmm. Let’s think about that? Let’s think of it as not the end of a story, but the beginning of a new story.

Off we go.

1992 UNCED Earth Summit. Comfortably installed at the Head Table in Rio de Janeiro.

1992, UNCED – EARTH SUMMIT, Rio de Janeiro

NOTICE ANYTHING A BIT WEIRD, PERHAPS A BIT UNSETTLING HERE? (Or is this the way things are supposed to be?)

COP15 2009: CLIMATE IS THE PORTAL TO NEW MOBILITY (Letter to the organizers)

Message from World Streets to the Copenhagen Summit: The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference

(Stand back Ladies. Let the men take care of this. Oops? )

Letter from the Editor: ON THE RUN-UP TO COPENHAGEN AND COP15

EcoPlan International 
8 rue Joseph Bara
75006 Paris France

27 September 2009

Dear Colleagues,

The climate agenda is getting high political and media attention worldwide, and there are many important events scheduled for the months immediately ahead. That is good. But in our view the agenda for sustainable transport system reform at all levels is timid, incoherent and in large part irrelevant given the real priorities. Well, what is relevant then? How can we get the level of innovation and reform that is going to be critical in the years immediately ahead?

Women, Climate Change and . . . Leadership

[From Wikipedia on Women, Leadership and Climate Change (2019 State of the art at http://bit.ly/2HMbKVZ)]

Introduction: The contributions of women in climate change have received increasing attention in the early 21st century. Feedback from women and the issues faced by women have been described as “imperative” by the United Nations and “critical” by the Population Reference Bureau. A report by the World Health Organizationconcluded that incorporating gender-based analysis would “provide more effective climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Women have made major contributions to climate change research and policy and to broader analysis of global environmental issues. They include many women scientists as well as policy makers and activists.

Op-Ed Uganda: Climate Change Mitigation – What must our government do?

Minibuses, or taxis, stuck in a traffic jam in Kampala. 20 Jan 2019

By Vincent Ogal.  Source: http://www.unesco-uganda.ug/ug/dreports/30/

Climate change is one of the absolute challenges facing humanity in this modern age, as the Earth’s near-surface temperatures continue to rise. Climate change is likely to disrupt the Earth’s ecological systems and to have serious negative consequences for agricultural production, forests, water supply, health systems and overall human development. Vulnerable populations (mainly the poor and most marginalized, including children, women and people with disabilities in developing countries) are particularly poorly equipped to cope with the adverse impacts of climate change.

As temperatures throughout East Africa and the rest of the world rise, precipitation is expected to increase, along with the frequency and intensity of droughts, floods, heat waves and landslides. Scientists predict that the rate of climate change will be more rapid than previously expected.

COP15 2009: CLIMATE IS THE PORTAL TO NEW MOBILITY (Letter to the organizers)

Message from World Streets to the Copenhagen Summit: The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference

(Stand back Ladies. Let the men take care of this. Oops? )

Letter from the Editor: ON THE RUN-UP TO COPENHAGEN AND COP15

EcoPlan International 
8 rue Joseph Bara
75006 Paris France

27 September 2009

Dear Colleagues,

The climate agenda is getting high political and media attention worldwide, and there are many important events scheduled for the months immediately ahead. That is good. But in our view the agenda for sustainable transport system reform at all levels is timid, incoherent and in large part irrelevant given the real priorities. Well, what is relevant then? How can we get the level of innovation and reform that is going to be critical in the years immediately ahead?

India: The gender divide in urban mobility

– by VIDYA MAHAMBARE / SOWMYA DHANARAJT+ T-

 

While cab-hailing services have helped working women, their expansion may increase congestion and pollution

Only around one in five women in the working age takes up paid work in urban India. In China, the number three in five. One key determinant of women’s ability to work, namely, the role of travel mobility — the available modes of transport, time and distance, convenience, and the cost of travelling — remains unexplored in the Indian context.

Women tend to have lower travel accessibility than men for two reasons.

What about women as cyclists? Dilatory reflections, notes and world-wide perspectives from Nijmegen ECF 2017

DRAFT FOR PEER REVIEW AND COMMENT

What about women as cyclists at Velo-city 2017?

Benoit Beroud, Mobility Designed for All consultant at Mobiped, attended, the World Cycling Congress, which occurred in Nijmegen (Netherlands) last June. He shares his notes and comments with World Streets after reflection some inspiring thoughts  about women and cycling in their day-to-day lives.

“First impression was given by pictures of the website, program (see above), and flyers of the conference: set of various women cycling. And it is not a misleading advertisement.”

Transport as an Issue for Women in the Pacific

Many of the key gender issues relating to the transport sector in the Pacific region – different travel needs of women from those of men, safety requirements, access to economic opportunities – are the same experienced by women across the world. Contexts may differ from that of Pacific Island nations beset by geographical, as well as socio-cultural challenges, however many issues are in common. Even within countries, transport needs vary greatly from a rural context to urban or peri-urban environments, as well as intra-national differences within island nations.

 – Author: Kim Titcombe. Independent consultant based in Europe and in Australia, specialized in the area of gender and development

(Program change) WOMEN, TRANSPORT AND LEADERSHIP: Seizing the Lead . . . Not Waiting for Permission

Program Name Change:

The full name of this international collaborative program has today been changed to “Women, Transport and Leadership: Seizing the Lead, Not Waiting for Permission”. For short, just “Women, Transport and Leadership” (or WTL)

Why?

You think your bus was crowded this morning

Survival of the Fittest – Gender and Public Transport in Kathmandu

* http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/video/2014/03/17/gender-public-transport-in-nepal

Mainstreaming gender issues into the rural transport sector: Seven research programmes underway in Asia and Africa

Gatnet: Collaborative problem-solving for a world-wide action agenda

Following a  discussion on GATNET  that took place during November-December 2015 — reference http://wp.me/p1bevG-7d — around why gender has not been mainstreamed into the rural transport sector and why addressing gender issues in rural transport has not been transformative, changing the unequal relations between women and  men, UK AID has commissioned seven research programmes in Asia and Africa to explore these issues  further. The  countries in which the research is taking place are Nepal (in South Asia), Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone,Liberia, Uganda and Ghana (in Africa). (See http://www.research4cap.org/SitePages/Home.aspx or join GATNET (below) for further updates).

Habitat III: Mainstreaming gender issues

The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number 5 of the UN says: “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”. All of the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals sound all-encompassing and too lofty to be pursued in a realistic manner. That, however, is the idea. The SDGs are value-pillars which guide planners while they go about their mundane tasks of drawing up maps and fighting resource crunches. Fortunately, the New Urban Agenda adopted in Habitat III breaks down these goals into sub-topics that people can wrap their heads around and know how to create a path towards achieving that utopian ideal.

What works for men doesn’t necessarily work for everyone

Why cities need to start planning with women in mind

 From the New Mobility Fine Arts Collection: The Inner Eye – Autumn 2016
– https://www.facebook.com/NewMobilityArts/