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…
Where are the women?
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.”
It is unclear exactly what is driving Indian women out of public spaces and into their homes, although there are some clues. Researchers found, for example, that marriage is “strongly associated with women’s seclusion: at all ages married women are more secluded than their unmarried peers,” and I couldn’t help thinking when I read that of the University of Michigan study I cited in Invisible Women, which found that US husbands were creating an additional seven hours of housework per week for their wives. There isn’t an exactly comparable study to show what extra work Indian husbands are piling on their wives, but again, there are clues here too. A recent analysis of Indian time use data found that while unmarried women spend only 6% of their day on domestic work, married women spend a quarter of their day keeping house (married men, by contrast, spend 3% of their time on this work). When you add in things like childcare and elder care, married women in India spend 52% of their waking hours on unpaid care — while never-married women spend only 12%. All of which simply leaves women with less time to be out and about.
Another clue comes via the finding that in states with a more skewed sex ratio (that is, states where there are fewer women than men overall, thanks to things like sex-selective abortion, migration, and higher female mortality), women spend less time out of their home, rather suggesting that women’s social value is connected with their ability to move freely through the world.
And then of course there is the issue of sexual harassment, which in fact is another reason that researchers might not find that an examination of Mumbai’s bus network substantially changes their findings. As I reported in Invisible Women, women are indeed more likely than men to use public transport (largely for economic reasons), but women also often choose not to use public transport because of the unchecked sexual harassment it can too often entail. Instead, women adjust their behaviour and their travel patterns — and sometimes they don’t go out at all.
Default male of the week
The quest to drive women out of public spaces is an old one, dating back millennia — but in recent years it has acquired a distinctly futuristic, tech-enabled flavour. In Invisible Women I wrote about the issue of gendered data gaps that resulted from male dominated tech companies simply not considering women in the design of their products. Many of these oversights resulted in tech that simply didn’t work as well for women, or, you know, fit our weird bodies that we can’t possibly expect anyone to cater to. But sometimes default male design resulted in tech that that made it easy for men to sexually harass women, driving us out of virtual spaces in much the same way as we get driven out of parks, streets and public transport. This is what happened to author Jordan Belamire, when she tried the virtual reality game QuiVr in multiplayer mode, and was in short order sexually assaulted by another user called BigBro442. As I wrote at the time, “‘Virtual’ makes it sound like it isn’t real – but it felt real to Belamire. And no wonder. VR is meant to feel real, and it can be so successful at tricking your brain that it is being explored as a treatment for PTSD, phobias, even phantom-limb syndrome.”
The reason I included this specific example in Invisible Women was not just to demonstrate what can happen when all-male teams design products that are meant to work for everyone, but because it was a particularly clear example of how the default male doesn’t have to be deliberate to be harmful. The male designers of the game were in fact horrified by what had happened to Belamire, and they immediately set out to ensure such a thing could never happen again. They redesigned “their ‘Personal Bubble’ setting (in which other player’s hands disappear if they come close to your face) to cover the entire body and so make such groping impossible” — and they also wondered how they could have “overlooked something so obvious?” To which the answer, obviously, is because they are men and aren’t used to having to game-plan how to avoid a casual groping whenever they appear in public. They had not set out to design a default male game with the capacity to harm women; it was just that their experiences of navigating the world as men meant that they were working with a gendered data gap. And while of course it would have been preferable for them to have had enough women on their design team (or at least to have consulted enough women) for this gap to have been closed prior to the launch of their game, they did at least comprehensively address the issue as soon as they found out about it.
Sadly, this approach seems to have fallen somewhat out of fashion among tech leaders, as the demonstrated by the response of Meta to the growing evidence that its pervert smart glasses are being used to abuse women. A recent analysis of publicly accessible Instagram videos made using these devices found multiple examples of male users targeting women as they engage in provocative behaviours such as Going to the Grocery Store, or Leaving The Gym. Filming them without their consent, hassling them for a date, for their their phone number, pursuing them if they say no - and then uploading the video to social media, often making details such as the woman’s social media handle or even her workplace available, resulting in the woman being harassed online as well as in person by a largely male audience outraged to find that a woman going about her day might not enjoy being covertly filmed and pursued by a strange man.
Commenters also objected to scolds like me describing the the behaviour of such men as harassment, claiming that it was “contributing to declining birth rates,” which is certainly a take, I’ll give them that (still, I can’t help wondering if the behaviour itself might not be a bigger driver than what we choose to call it — but as exactly the kind of childless cat lady who is personally responsible for driving down birth rates I would say that, wouldn’t I).
The data analysis also revealed “a clear correlation between the ‘covertness’ of the filming modality and the severity of the harassment,” with covert filming being associated with the highest rates of women being pursued after they tried to disengage. And yet Meta’s one sop to preventing covert filming is a small light on the glasses to indicate it is on — which users quickly found a way to disable. “The company’s answer to covert recording was a light on the device and an expectation that users would somehow just behave responsibly,” one of the authors of the paper explained to Samantha Cole, a reporter for 404media. “That has plainly not worked, and it leaves the burden on the people being filmed rather than on the company that built the device and owns the platforms the footage ends up on.”
Meta’s failure to properly consider and guard against the obvious potential for their glasses to be used as a supercharged harassment tool against women might have been a default male oversight, but their failure to take serious steps to address the issue since then is far harder to frame as an innocent whoopsie — and this failure extends beyond the glasses themselves. The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, announced in July that the platform would start removing such content. And yet when 404media reporter Samantha Cole checked the site in August, she “easily found pages and pages of Reels by men approaching women while wearing smart glasses where the women being filmed either don’t seem to know they’re being recorded, or obviously don’t want to be filmed and repeatedly tell the man recording them to stop.”
Naturally, Meta is not the only tech company that doesn’t appear too exercised by reports of how its products are being used to abuse women. In the US a growing number of police officers have been accused (and sometimes convicted) of using ALPR (Automatic License Plate Recognition) technology (designed to track criminals) to stalk women. According to a Washington Post investigation “[a]uthorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk women without their knowledge or consent.” One police officer in Wisconsin “allegedly used [ALPR] to check whether his ex-girlfriend had gone to an abortion clinic.” Another in Atlanta tracked his ex obsessively, texting her when she went to buy groceries, or when she went to the doctor Once, when he thought she’d gone on a date, he messaged her, “I didn’t think you would slip up.”
Some women don’t report their stalkers because, as one woman pointed out, “who do you turn the chief of police in to?” And while some police officers have been charged following reports, the Washington Post found that some police departments “allowed officers to continue using the systems even after receiving warnings that they were being misused.”
Alexandria Griffith, a mother in Leechburg, Pennsylvania, said in an interview that she repeatedly warned the police department and district attorney’s office that her officer husband had stalked and threatened her. During one text exchange she shared with The Post, the officer, Michael McSherry, shared a screenshot of her license plate in the search results of [an ALPR platform] to claim she had lied to him. “Plate readers dont lie,” he wrote.
Griffith said officials at both agencies dismissed her pleas. Within days, she said, McSherry confronted her in her parents’ home armed with a gun, shoving her and her 4-year-old son and threatening to kill himself, according to a police report.
The ALPR platform most US police forces use is called Flock, and going by the pronouncements of its CEO, Garrett Langley, it doesn’t seem as if any major solutions will be forthcoming any time soon. Langley has described the criminal use of his criminal-tracking-platform as “a trade-off that I can make,” and (in a line that reeks of PR workshopping) told Forbes magazine, “No one elected me the police chief of America. I don’t think it’s our job to police the police.” Of one police chief who used Flock to stalk his ex partner, Langley said, “He was probably a bad person. He was going to do this, one way or another.” And Flock simply cannot do anything about the badness of humans — or can they?
Experts argue that ALPR searches could and should be restricted to officers who have a warrant (Flock says this is far too difficult for them, a smol bean company valued last year at $7.5 billion, to make work). Officers should also be required “to label every search with a criminal case number” (a recent investigation found that 85 percent of searches had a one-word justification, such as “suspicious” or “drugs,” or “investigation” and that “ less than 3 percent of searches had been linked to a criminal case.”) These changes would make it harder for rogue officers to misuse the product, and easier for internal investigation officers to spot bad behaviour — assuming, that is, police departments are actually tracking what their officers are doing, which, it transpires, many of them are not.
And so abusive men continue to stalk and harass women, tech companies continue to shrug their shoulders, women continue to be driven out of public spaces — and apparently no one cares.
GFPs of the week
Well, that was all pretty grim wasn’t it, let’s finish with some better news. I actually don’t know if the women at the heart of this story are GFPs, but THEY SHOULD BE (and in any case they are spiritual GFPs, which is what matters).
It all started last year, when Adele, a theatre nurse in Swansea, noticed something troubling about the lead gown that was meant to protect her during surgery (X-rays are used repeatedly during orthopaedic trauma and reconstructive surgery to guide the surgeons’ work): “the upper outer quadrant of her breasts and axillae (armpit) weren’t covered.”
She was shocked, having always trusted that they were safe — and immediately got to work trying to fix the problem (you see? GFP!) First came the data collection: she got her colleagues “to try on different sizes of the tabard-style gowns, but none seemed to contour to the women’s bodies.” Go figure.
They got in touch with “the lead gown company what products they had specifically for women’s bodies,” which, it transpired, did manufacture an “elasticated, adjustable breast and axillary shield is meant to move with who’s wearing it, compatible with waistcoat-style gowns.”
Then they tracked down “a senior sister over the border in England, who had bought this design for every female member of her staff” and spoke to “consultant surgeons, anaesthetists and radiologists, outlining what we needed and why,” and got them on board.
As of the time of writing, Adele and her colleagues are waiting for the Trust’s new financial year, at which point they hope funding for PPE that actually does its job of protecting workers will be forthcoming…so the good news is, well, pending. But I have to say I wouldn’t bet against them — would you?
Poppy pic of the week
Poppy says she’s missed you all! Here she is missing you while sticking her tongue out
That’s it for now, my dear GFPs! Until next time…xoxoxo