Abstracts

Few developing country research and development projects have adequately accounted for the intersection of gender, transport and mobility. This paper brings together recent evidence from rural and urban transport case studies in less developed countries. Women’s disadvantaged position in transport systems is apparent throughout. However, rather than simply use the studies to confirm general trends, this paper highlights both similarities and differences in women’s experiences in order to stress the need for locally-adapted gender-sensitive transport strategies. Once this local dimension is brought back in, "giving voice" to women in transport planning and practice does not have to remain a lofty theoretical principle. Crucial, practical advances can be made by improving the quality of household and user surveys and by collecting all data in a sex-disaggregated manner. These efforts should be complemented by comprehensive, locally-targeted gender analyses and action plans. Depending on local context, the provision of special transit services to women may be an appropriate intervention, but should not be seen as a permanent solution.

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Over the course of the last decade, transport planners, geographers, economists and policy makers all over the world have increasingly recognized that the differences in travel and activity patterns between men and women are a central and recurring feature in transportation systems all over the world. A growing body of academic literature has emerged over the last few years addressing the complex relationships between transportation/mobility and gender, both in developed (see e.g. Rosenbloom 1993, Spitzner 1998, Terlinden, 1994, Spitzner and Beik 1994, Hamilton, Jenkins and Gregory 1991, Jones 1990; Little, Peake and Richardson 1989; Grieco, Pickup and Whipp 1989) and developing countries (see especially Turner and Fouracre 1995; Levy 1992; Fernando 1997; Grieco Apt, and Turner, 1996).

Even major development institutions such as the World Bank, UNDP, the Swedish SIDA or the Canadian CIDA, are now increasingly producing research, manuals and other written materials on gender and transportation. Much of it is still "grey literature," that is academic studies, consultant reports and/or other not widely distributed writings produced mostly for internal use (e.g. Bamberger and Lebo 1998; Peters and Bamberger 1998, McCann 1998; Hook 1998; Bujorjee et al. 1997; SIDA 1997). A noteworthy exception is the material produced by the so-called Gender and Transport Thematic Group (GTTG) recently instituted by the World Bank. Over the course of the last few years, this internal World Bank Thematic Group has assembled a sizeable amount of (old and new) research, case studies, pilot projects and supplementary materials, most of which is now easily accessible through the Group’s website (see under www.worldbank.org/gender/transport). The Group has also organized several workshops, brownbag lunches and other exchanges that have improved transport professionals’ understanding of gender issues. (Annex II presents the conclusions of the Group’s international seminar on "Gender and Transport: Promoting an International Partnership," held in Washington D.C. in the spring of 1999.)

Yet while more researchers and development professionals today are busing themselves with trying to understand gender differences in access and mobility than ever before, still relatively few of the recent insights have found their way back into actual transport planning and policy making practice. Few local level transport plans and projects explicitly address the issue of gender. Bamberger and Lebo (1998:1) note that "in fiscal 1997 just 4 percent of [World] Bank transport projects included a gender component or gender actions - compared with 15 percent for water supply projects, 35 percent for agriculture, 44 percent for education, and 67 percent for population, health, and nutrition." The Bank’s Transport Sector Policy Review (1996:78) concluded that "to date, transport policies have been geared primarily to the needs of men." As a result, women at the local level continue to struggle every day to overcome the adversities of inefficient local transport systems designed according to the needs of male wage earners and their journeys to work.

The present paper aims to bring together existing research, theoretical insights and descriptions of women's actual reality on the ground, drawing freely from a wide range of experiences in urban and rural settings in the Southern Hemisphere.

Available research is not quite as varied as one might wish, however. The vast majority of gender-aware transport research and development projects in less-developed countries have focused on the rural realm. Most of it has concentrated on Sub-Saharan Africa (Barwell 1996, Barwell, Airey and Strandberg 1993; Dawson and Barwell 1993; Howe and Bryceson 1993; Barwell and Malmberg-Calvo 1989; Doran 1996; Malmberg-Calvo 1994), and to a much lesser extent on other locations in Africa, in Asia or Latin America (see e.g. IFRTD 1999, Ahmed 2000). However, there have been a few recent research and/or development projects that have specifically looked at the issue of gender and mobility in the urban realm, most notably in the context of the World Bank’s Urban Transport Projects in Dhaka, Bangladesh (Shefali, 2000; Paul-Majumder and Shefali 1997), in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan (Kudat et al, 1997), and in Lima, Peru (Gomez 2000a, Gomez 2000b). The British Transport Research Laboratory also sponsored several studies, such as Astrop’s (1996) study on Pune, India.

2. Rationales for Addressing Gender Issues in Transport Planning and Policy

When presenting the overall rationales for addressing gender issues in transport, a combination of equity and efficiency arguments can be advanced. The core finding of all existing evidence is that women are responsible for a disproportionate share of the household's transport burden while at the same time having more limited access to available means of transport. It is important to recognize that this is not a mere equity question. Gendered transport and mobility patterns have measurable detrimental economic consequences first of all for the women themselves, but as a consequence also for their respective household units and ultimately for society as a whole. In the past, gender issues were typically dismissed by economists, planners and policy-makers as "soft science" arguments that did not produce measurable variables for use in "hard science" economic analysis such as cost benefit studies. Even World Bank project managers trained in mainstream neoclassical economic analysis are currently asked to rethink that notion (see e.g. Bamberger and Lebo 1998).

Recognizing gender issues as economically consequential of course does not mean that economic incentives targeted towards women will by themselves restore the balance. The underlying causes for women’s inequality remain deeply rooted in society. In oversimplifying both the complex interplay of social, cultural, political and economic processes as well as their related analyses in the academic literature on gender, three interrelated explanatory variables for women’s unequal access to transport facilities deserve special mention: patriarchy, poverty and planning/policy.

Patriarchy is an overarching concept influencing local power relationships and cultures. It is therefore directly related to the gendered division of labor in both modern and traditional societies, with the household (or family) unit as the central perpetuator of the societal system. Men, in their superior power position within the household hierarchy, tend to appropriate the most efficient means of transport for themselves. In this interpretation, cars, motorcycles, bicycles or animal carts are mainly seen as household assets and resources over which men, as the most powerful members of the household, would obviously seek to maintain control. Given the lower levels of overall motorization in less developed countries, power struggles are more likely to occur even over non-motorized forms of transport. For example, Overton (1996) documents a case in rural Mozambique where bicycles that were distributed to poor village women to alleviate their extreme transport burdens were taken from them by their husbands or other male relatives, who often only used them for recreational and status purposes. In some cases, especially where women resisted, these appropriations were even accompanied with instances of domestic violence. In such extreme cases, male-dominated prevailing local cultures also tend to portray women's use of bicycles as inappropriate and unwomanly, branding the more daring, dissenting women as "loose," "behaving like men" and "unfit for marriage" (Grieco, Turner and Kwakye 1995, Overton 1996). Ironically, many of the concerns voiced in traditional communities around the world regarding women cyclists are striking echoes of the early European and US reactions. Consider the following account in Willard (1991, orig. 1895):

Local cultures and general social practices are often much more powerful restraints on women's access to vehicles than concrete power struggles within the household. The flip side of this is that careful project design can successfully address many of these culturally rooted restraints at relatively low additional cost, often yielding immediate and very significant economic development results.

Poverty explanations for gendered transport and mobility patterns are more economically-oriented and tend to regard socio-cultural aspects as important yet secondary. According to this view, favored by many within development institutions, women’s inadequate access to transport infrastructures and services is most frequently related to their lack of capacity to pay. In fact, economistic approaches have gained considerable ground recently, and the overall phenomenon of "feminization of poverty" has surely emerged as a hot topic of debate in both developed and developing countries. While women's disempowered status within the household unit (i.e. patriarchy) undeniably plays a crucial role in this, it is important to note that forces beyond the simple household distribution of labor are also at work to shape this undesirable, inequitable outcome, and that these forces are increasingly complex. In times where men tended to be the only income-earning members of the household, women were cash-poor and economically dependent on their male partners just for lack of their own income. Today, with the increasing entry of women into the wage-earning labor force, this situation has changed somewhat. Nevertheless, the problem of unequal distribution of reproductive, unpaid labor is still exacerbated by the fact that women's directly productive labor is economically undervalued compared to men's. Many women are stuck in low-wage jobs that earn barely enough to eek out a living. Increasingly gendered urban labor markets are developing, especially in the Latin American and Asian textile industries (Chant 1996). Where possible, women usually prefer to live close to their workplaces that they can walk to work and save on transport costs. Often such housing is not available, however. Daily commutes of five hours or more are not uncommon among the working poor in developing country cities, especially when they live in peripheral settlements that have poor public transport accessibility.

2.3. Planning / Policy

Caren Levy (1990) succinctly summarizes the core problem with traditional transport planning and policy making: mainstream planning models and methodologies simplified the enormous complexity of travel and transport patterns through three basic yet faulty assumptions:

• Households consists of nuclear families with a husband, a wife and children.

• There is a clear gender division of labor in the family where the man takes the "productive" role of the is the income-earning "breadwinner" and the woman the "reproductive" role of the housewife or "homemaker."

• Everybody has equal access to resources and equal power in decision-making in matters concerning the household's livelihood and well-being.

With a thus defined hierarchy, the travel and transport needs of the "typical" male household head became the "natural" priority of urban transport planners and policy makers. However, these stereotypical assumptions are increasingly inappropriate characterizations of most households in developing country environments. The above assumptions also cling to an outdated dichotomy of ‘productive’ men vs. ‘reproductive’ women. Women make up at least a third of the world's productive labor force. Moreover, women’s reproductive labor is equally important for the well-being and survival of the household as any paid labor.

Without clearly acknowledging and documenting women's multiple roles in society, transport planning is unlikely to meet their travel and transport needs. Transport planning methodologies need to become more gender equitable and give justice to the totality of today’s urban fabrics.

With limited access to individual means of transport, the vast majority of female residents in developing countries are dependent on either walking or on public means of transport, which can be both motorized (e.g. buses, subways) or non-motorized (e.g. rickshaw taxis in Asia, boda-boda bicycles in Uganda). Beyond the basic yet grave problem of urban gridlock, poor route planning for public transport then tends to exacerbate the situation of women. Women often trip-chain. They combine their various domestic and care-taking responsibilities with wage earning trips. Transport systems targeted only at peak hour male commuter trip patterns do not serve their needs. They typically have to make multiple stops, pay multiple fares, and travel during off peak hours, when service is less reliable and waiting areas are less safe. Walking remains a predominant mode among rural and poor urban populations, with women typically accounting for a disproportionate share. In most cities and towns around the world, infrastructure planning continues to primarily cater to the needs of the car- or motorcycle-driving, largely male majority. By focusing on planning interventions that directly target the particular transport problems of women, much could be done to alleviate their burden.
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Women’s transport needs in less developed countries are hardly sufficiently documented, let alone adequately addressed by transport planners and providers. Especially in urban setting, gender advocates are thus still operating from a relatively small body of research upon which to base their observations and conclusions. Several important first steps have been taken, however. In particular, rationales for action regarding the lack of attention to gender in transportation have been increasingly and convincingly voiced by many international development organizations.

Economistic approaches may dominate in the beginning, but there is now much greater awareness of the social intra-household dynamics that dictate accessibility, control and ownership of means of transport. Targeting women as a special group must therefore still be considered a valid intervention, although not a permanent solution. Hopefully enough additional case studies and pilot projects will result from the new attention women’s access and mobility problems have received more recently to further advance our knowledge on this pressing topic. We are still quite far from the ultimate goal of mainstreaming gender concerns into transport planning and practice, and there will have to be much more gender-sensitizing and re-learning of common thinking and practice.

Annex II presents a long list of conclusions and recommendations that were presented as the result of a special seminar on Gender and Transport held by the World Bank in April 1999. As noted above, some important steps to address particular issues have been taken, but as a whole the listed shortcomings and urgent tasks remain valid as they stand. Policy-makers have a key role to play in the active mainstreaming of gender issues into all infrastructure sectors, with transport being on of the most important ones.