Pervert glasses and missing women

Well hello there my dear GFPs! I trust you’ve all had a wonderful summer and haven’t been too traumatised by heat-domes.

First things first: I was extremely touched by the lovely GFPs who got in touch to check I was ok, having noticed that I had not only pressed pause on newsletter writing, but also on subscription charges. I’m sorry for worrying you! I hadn’t planned on needing a break, which is why I didn’t say anything in the last edition of this newsletter, but a combination of book-writing burnout and a few health and family issues meant that I ended up needing one. So I decided to pause payments and pause writing to you and come back when I was ready. And here I am!

Other than that not a huge amount of news to report, except that I was delighted to have been nominated alongside some very impressive people as an honorary fellow of the MRS, whose enjoyably punny tagline, “evidence matters,” I am appropriating as my own.

Anyway, that’s enough of me, onto the missing women of Mumbai…

That’s the question asked by a recent paper first sent my way by the excellent Helen Lewis (whose always fascinating and funny newsletter you should all subscribe to), after researchers conducted a visual audit across 900km of randomly selected roads in the Mumbai metropolitan region and found, well, mainly men.

The story starts, as ever with a gendered data gap: “for no major city in the developing world,” explain the authors of this paper, “do we have a representative estimate of women’s share of the street population.” And this matters, not only because women’s presence on city streets tell us a lot about how freely they can exercise their right to exist in public at all, but also because without this data, evidence-based policy-making becomes impossible. If we don’t know how many women are moving freely in a city before we, for example, introduce street lighting, or adequate toilet provision, we have no way of knowing what effect, if any, these interventions have had. And if we don’t have the data to back up their effectiveness it becomes all too easy to cut such provisions if and when a government is looking to make savings — as for example when councils across England responded to spending cuts in the 2010s by switching off street lighting. They argued that this was fine, because it didn’t drive up crime — but very few thought to consider the effect on women’s mobility. And, as long-time GFPs will know, it’s best to not even get me started on public toilet closures.

Thanks to the authors of this paper, the government of the greater Mumbai area is in luck because this data now exists — and the findings are pretty stark. In Mumbai itself, women made up 16.4% of visible people, while in the planned satellite city of Navi Mumbai they made up only 14.7%, which, as probably goes without saying, does not cohere with the number of women who actually live in either city. Researchers estimated “pedestrian sex ratios of 239 and 223 women per 1,000 men, implying 71% and 76% of women expected based on residential ratios are missing from the streets.” And these women were all documented during daylight hours — which means that measured over twenty-four hours female representation is likely to be even lower.

So…where are the women? The researchers immediately discounted the possibility that women were simply tucked away in cars: the main forms of private transport in the cities are motorbikes, bicycles and scooters, and women were even less represented on those than as pedestrians, making up “8.4% of two-wheeler users in Mumbai and 5.7% in Navi Mumbai.” It is of course possible, as the authors explain, that women are instead camping out in public transport, which they were unable to document in this study (they intend to address it in future work), but there is reason to doubt that such a study would substantially change the figures, not least because using public transport involves being a pedestrian. And so while an examination of Mumbai’s bus network probably would increase the figures somewhat, it seems unlikely to substantially close the gap between women’s existence in the city and their presence in public.

Then of course there is the research showing that Indian women really are much less likely than Indian men to enter into public spaces. A recent paper documenting levels of “seclusion” among Indian women, that is the number of women who leave home very little or not at all, found “extremely high levels of seclusion with the median married woman leaving home for just 0.5 hours/day and 45% not leaving home at all on a given day.” Comparing Indian time use data from 1998 and 2019, researchers also found that “seclusion amongst married women grew considerably between 1998 and 2019 […] with the married fraction of women not leaving home at all on a given day increasing threefold over this time.”

And the seclusion starts early. In young children, the researchers write, “there is no discernible gender gap” with boys and girls both spending roughly six hours outside the home. Girls’ time outside the home peaks at age eleven, and by the age of fourteen a significant gender gap has emerged, “driven initially by a sharp increase in seclusion for girls.”