Non-Sexist City

Women at a Disadvantage

So what is the problem? Although planning is for people, it has been shown that women suffer disadvantage within a built environment that is developed by men, primarily for other men. Women make up the majority of public transport users, the elderly, the disabled, shoppers, care providers, and the ethnic minority population. Much of urban sociology, social policy, and urban criminology has traditionally focused on the experience, work, and problems of men, not least on the problems experienced by the male aggressor as against the female victim within the inner city. Women have been seen stereotypically as suburban housewives or bored wives, or simply as invisible, whereas, in reality, the female population includes a wide range of social-class groups, incomes, and levels of education. Women live in all sorts of places of residence: just like men, who are also not a unitary group. Women were categorized according to the social class of either their father or their husband and failed to capture the true position of women in society, economically, socially, and culturally. This was the custom until feminism began to reshape sociological study and to demonstrate the differences between women's and men's experience of work, the city, and life itself.

Women have distinct roles and responsibilities in society, all of which generate different usage of urban space. Fewer women than men have access to the use of a car, and thus, most public-transport users are women whose daily travel patterns are more complex than men's because many are combining work with child care and other home-making commitments. This has implications for all levels of policy making, including the citywide macro level of overall strategic policy, the district meso level of local planning, and the detailed micro level of daily practicalities, as explained below.

At the macro level of overall urban form and structure, cities have traditionally been zoned and the land uses divided according to male life experience, on the basis of separating out home and [Page 570]work by creating separate residential and employment zones and building an extensive car-based transport system to get male workers to their jobs on time. Zoning was undertaken in the name of public health and efficiency, but it was heavily influenced by historical attitudes about the proper place of woman within the city of man, that is, separate and at home. Modern women have lives and work that take place outside the home while still being predominantly responsible for child care, shopping, and homemaking. For example, a woman may set off from home; stop off at the child care facility, then at the school, and finally at work, returning via the school gates, grocery store, and child caregiver, resulting in a complicated trip rather than a simple mono-purpose commute.

...