Proceedings of the
International Conference on Urban Poverty
9-13th November 1997
Florence, Italy.
Gender and transport received a vigorous, even conflictual, discussion at this meeting, many were persuaded of the importance of the issue - others remained to be convinced. There is clearly need for further advocacy and research into the area. The entry in the proceeding was as follows:
Gender, Poverty and Transport: A Call for Policy Attention
Margaret Grieco, University of North London
&
Jeff Turner, University of Manchester.
Across the body of our research , it has become clear to us that women’s greater domestic responsibilities, coupled with their weaker access to household resources have significant consequences on their transport and travel status. The lower the income of a household, the more probable it is that women experience greater house-hold deprivation than men. Transport deprivation may take the form of women’s journeys having multiple purposes and thus generating greater anxiety in the travel context; it may take the form of customary or legal constraints on women’s rights to travel or to use a particular transport mode.
Despite the now almost universal recognition that women’s domestic load, often in combination with low paid or unpaid work, leaves women both time-poor and resource-poor; the implications of this situation for transport and travel have largely gone unconsidered and unremarked. Development projects all too frequently accept the immobility of women as a natural unchangeable social state which simply explains the low level of women’s participation in project planning and design even within communal or popular planning modes. The possibility of bringing about participative forums where women are to be found rarely receives adequate attention and projects which attempt to move the boundaries around women’s access to transport and travel are few and far between. Developing women-friendly transport and travel service has, with a few notable exceptions, generally held a low-priority status in policy maker’s thinking both in the developed and developing worlds. Yet any attempt to tackle poverty systematically must, given the social composition of the poor, tackle gender disparities to access opportunities.
What can be done? In order to bring about a reduction in urban poverty, we must pay attention to the specific gender aspects of the poverty trap. We need protocols in transport policy and planning which explicitly address the gender dimension:
Gender, Poverty & Transport in full.
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