Gender and transport: a neglected area?
"travel patterns are among the most clearly 'gendered' aspects of American life." Martin Wachs
Women's travel patterns are very different to those of men (Grieco, Pickup and Whipp, 1989): the household responsibilities of women are heavier than those of men and typically result in women combining more activities in the course of trip making than do men. Women, most particularly those with young children, 'tripchain'(http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/1999cpr/ch_01/cpm01_5.htm and http://www-cta.ornl.gov/npts/1995/Doc/Chain2.pdf for US materials) - men's journeys are more often single purpose (Note 1). But public transport arrangements and private household transport arrangements have often been designed and organised primarily with the needs of men in mind.
There are negative equity and efficiency consequences of the gender bias in current transport arrangements (http://www.earthsummit2002.org/wcaucus/meetingreports/csd9/transportstatement.htm)and policy makers are increasingly beginning to take stock of the need for fundamental change in transport organisation. In the United Kingdom, Professor Kerry Hamilton of the University of East London has recently conducted a gender audit of transport arrangements for the DETR (http://www.uel.ac.uk/womenandtransport/audit.htm) - this was the first of its kind in the transport policy environment.
In developing countries, most particularly, in Africa women bear an unequal share of the rural burden of transport - girls and women headload goods which in other locations are moved on the backs of vehicles (Grieco, Apt and Turner, 1996). Intervening to equalise the rural transport burden - a burden which has negative consequences for women's health - has become a policy issue amongst agencies such as the World Bank http://www.worldbank.org/gender/transport/PREMnote14.pdf.pdf .
This short presentation, along with the hyper-link listing attached to it, is designed to give an insight into the equity and efficiency issues attending the current gendered pattern of transport organisation.
Gender and mobility constraints: a focus on Africa.
Historically, devices to constrain the mobility of women have been present in many cultures: the breaking and binding of the feet of Chinese women (http://www.sfmuseum.org/chin/foot.html), the enforcement of strict purdah on women within a variety of cultures (http://www.itdp.org/read/DEALSGEN.doc and http://www.worldbank.org/gender/transport/Key_Issues/key_issues.htm) and the Saudi Arabian prohibition against women driving (http://travel.state.gov/saudi.html) all provide well known and highly transparent constraints on mobility with very real consequence for the social power of the social category - women and girls - so constrained.
Of course, the experience of constraints on mobility is much wider than this: legal constraints on mobility remain in many countries where women can not travel abroad without the written permission of their husband or male relatives but a far greater volume of mobility constraint is located in the interaction between the organisation of household and the market structures of society with their associated poverty profiles.
The organisation of the household typically places the greater task burden or time poverty on women: in many developing countries the task burdens of the majority of women have negative consequences for their mobility and where their tasks require travel (such as Africa's female petty traders), this travel occurs inside tight time windows which increase stress. Indeed stress in the travel environment for those with heavy domestic task loads is common - recent work in the North East of England revealed a cluster of agrophobics amongst young mothers with heavy task burdens and poor quality travel arrangements.
Participation in decision making and in governance requires both a time freedom and a mobility capability. Organisations such as Self Employed Women's Association (http://www.sewa.org) in Gujarat have worked to ensure that women are institutionally resourced to extend their time freedom and mobility capabilities. As part of their organisational practice, they ensure that members drawn from the village communities travel to organisation meetings locally, regionally and internationally. They have a well developed escort structure where village women will be joined by their educated sisters on international trips which include institutions like the World Bank.
SEWA has best practice. However many attempts to extend governance and participation (http://www.geocities.com/margaret_grieco/womenont/gen_tran.html) ignore the time freedom and mobility constraints of women with the consequence that governance remains in the hands of those with most access to household and community resources. It is a vicious cycle and even spiral. Increasing village participation in regional decision making appears a completely benign process, however, if no gender adjustment is made around access to village resources enhancing village resources in this way simply increases the power distance between men and women in a village. Integration into higher level decision making makes the village men more powerful and the village women weaker in the bargaining game. The task burden of women prevents travel to distant locations, the mobility constraint affects bargaining power, reduced bargaining power affects the ability to claim entitlement to a fair share of transport resources, the market cost of motorised transport places fast travel beyond the social horizon of women.
This pattern is not simply a feature of the developing world: within the developed world males and females display very different transport patterns which reflect the disproportionate share of the domestic task burden borne by women and their weaker access to an equitable share of household resources which would enable comfortable and convenient travel parallel to that enjoyed by their menfolk.
In rural Africa, the situation is even worse. More of the load of rural Africa is carried on the heads of women and girls than is carried by motorised vehicles. Women and girls are a form of transport and being a form of transport reduces their time to travel. Typically roads are built on a gender platform: the building of a road will ease the burden of women by opening up the options for motorised carriage of goods but typically women continue to have to headload locally needed supplies which do not fit into a cash crop framework. Water and wood continue to be headloaded and small farmers continue to have to headload their goods to the local market - indeed, even in urban African locations, women continue to headload wood, water and goods.
The development of viable local transport markets on a community model incorporating appropriate low cost high impact information technologies has received little policy consideration. The 'gender rationale' has been hijacked in the interests of road contractors and other beneficiaries of the 'public works' funding and financing system without delivering major benefits to women and girls.
For women and girls in rural Africa, access to cash is highly restricted. And the international institutions have historically weakened the relative positions of women in their communities by encouraging the development of cash crops without ensuring that gender equity is present in this sector. Men's access to cash has been accompanied by women's lack of access to cash. The development of transport on a market rather than a community basis necessarily has the consequence of restricting women's ability to travel and enhancing that of men with the consequence negative power distance outcomes. These negative power distance outcomes also have consequences for health as can be readily viewed in maternal mortality and infant mortality statistics for Africa: routine restrictions on access to travel take on greater dimensions when health crises such as childbirth require travel and the prevailing institutional environment prevents it. In Ghana, for example, permission to travel to a hospital for the sake of the health of mother or child frequently requires a husband's or male elder's permission and where this individual is not readily located or refuses the permission the consequences are often tragic.
Historically such factors have been ignored in transport planning both within the developed and developing world, however, national governments, including that of the USA, and international agencies have begun to focus on these issues and attempted to collect gendered statistics and data on transport and travel experience.
Accessibility planning: the advent of a gender-friendly approach
The recording of women's mobility constraints over the range of the world's societies and cultures which has taken place over the last decade and a half has led to an increasing policy recognition of the importance of accessibility planning (http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/ruralinclusion.html). The pressure for the centralisation of health, education and other services within the economies of scale perspective is increasingly giving way to a decentralisation or distributed resources perspective. Locally available services better service women who because of child care mobility restrictions, as well as other cultural proscriptions and taboos, cannot access top end centralised facilities.
Within developing countries, external experts such as the World Bank have been actively promoting the decentralisation of health and education facilities. In line with such decentralisation models of services, new models of transport provision have emerged. There is now funding for rural travel and transport programs which focus on improving within village and within locality pathways: water facilities are brought within closer reach and pathways between settlements and facilities are improved. The focus is no longer simply on the trunk road. Associated with these decentralised models of development are new models of governance which give end users a real say in the organisation and operation of facilities. The involvement of women in water management committees has rapidly taken hold as a governance model for appropriate development.
Accessibility planning is not simply a model for third world communities. Current work in Britain by the Cabinet Office Social Exclusion Unit (http://www.socialexclusionunit.gov.uk/publications/reports/html/Making%20the%20Connections/contents.htm)on the issue of transport and social exclusion in which gender is one dimension has focused upon the importance of improved accessibility planning for low income communities. The mobility constraints experienced by young mothers in low income communities as a consequence of the poor design of public transport vehicles and services has brought the issue of accessibility planning to the fore. The development of health facilities in communities where the traditional general practitioners have departed and the distance to centralised health facilities is inhibiting is a feature of the new partnership forms of public welfare provision. New partnership forms of governance require communities to take an active part in bidding for and operating health resources: these new forms of provision have both positive and negative aspects but our concern here is to record the fundamental link between such forms and accessibility planning in relation to gender.
Gender, scheduling and E-accessibility: fine tuning women's access to services
E-forms produce new accessibility contours for women: education, health information, participation in governance are all made more accessible by distributed technologies which enable local access to previously centralised resources. Both within the developing and developed worlds the contribution of the e-form in redressing old barriers in gendered accessibility is apparent (http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/ruralinclusion.html): not only does the technology make direct access to services more possible even in the remotest locations, it also has the potential to make the scheduling of journeys to access services located elsewhere an easier and more possible business.
New information technologies can open up the prospect of transport arrangements which are better suited to reducing power distances between men and women and inducing a virtuous spiral which has positive impacts for women's health, wealth and time to participate in governance. Hand held, low cost technologies can be used to summon vehicles which are shared between communities to locations where there are medical emergencies: for example, vehicles can be summoned to points of interchange between slow rural transport modes and fast vehicle corridors. Indeed, such moves are in process in Malawi where radio is the communication mode used. Shared purpose vehicles become possible as a consequence of the advent of new fleet management technologies: vehicles intended for extension activities can be communicated with in journey and directed to undertake crisis journeys within the area of their presence. Hand held communication technologies are already used by the bushmen of the Kalahari to communicate information within the framework of environmental management: and there is no good reason why such technology can not be aligned with fleet management technologies used by the range of international institutional and government agencies to produce better outcomes on maternal mortality or AIDs.
Conclusion: Repairing an historical neglect.
This short presentation has drawn attention to gender patterns of travel and transport; their historical neglect by transport planners and governments and international agencies; the redress of this neglect by policy makers and development institutions with the collection of gendered data; the increasing mainstreaming of gender into transport design and delivery with a focus on accessibility planning and finally has drawn attention to changed gender accessibility and mobility contours as a consequence of the development of e-forms and their interaction with the transport sector.
An awareness of the gender dimensions of travel and transport is now evident amongst professionals and policymakers: it still, however, remains the case that the bulk of transport and travel developments are conducted within old frameworks which have at best only passing regard to these considerations.
Notes:
1. A recent report by the British Department for Transport (http://www.local-transport.dft.gov.uk/schooltravel/increase/literature/06.htm) indicates that there is 'surprisingly' little difference in the trip chaining patterns of men and women and gives as the source of this understanding: DETR (1998) Focus on Personal Travel, HMSO, London. I have yet to review this source and investigate how the statistics were obtained but these statistics if they do hold would indeed be very surprising given the different activity patterns of men and women. It may be that the concept of 'trip chaining' requires further refinement to enable differentiation between the densities of female and male trips: are the links in the male chain more discretionary than for females i.e. the gymn after work as opposed to child collection from school?. Evidence of the complexity of gender differences as identified in Finland can be found at: http://www.tft.lth.se/kfbkonf/5Kalenoja.PDF
Key sources:
http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/genderedjourneys/index.html
http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/ruralinclusion.html
World Bank Gender and Transport web site
NDP Gender equality unit - Dublin
(for French speakers) http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/femme.html
Background references:
Grieco, M. (1996) Workers' dilemmas: recruitment, reliability and repeated exchange. Routledge: London
Grieco, M., N. Apt, and J. Turner, (1996). At Christmas and on rainy days: transport, travel and the female traders of Accra. Avebury: Aldershot
Grieco, M., L. Pickup, and R. Whipp, (eds)(1989) Gender, transport and employment. Gower: Aldershot
E-archives on women, work and spatial mobility: