The Public Transport Gender Audit has been prepared by Transport Studies at the University of East London for the Mobility Unit of the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR). We carried out a wide-ranging literature search and used focus-groups to identify and explore the factors which affect women's experience and enjoyment (or not) of public transport. We then translated these findings into a Checklist by which to measure the usefulness and acceptability to women of the public transport which might be offered or proposed. We start with an overview of women in Britain today, looking at some of the factors which illuminate women's experience and expectations of transport. There is obviously not room for an in-depth analysis of women's position in society, but we indicate a framework for the consideration of women and transport. Chapter 3 reports on the literature search. As researchers in this area will know, there has not been much work on gender and transport, and we therefore had, at an early stage, to look to other fields of gender studies in order to draw on their experiences and solutions. The most fruitful was development studies: project after project reports that schemes to improve services for women often fail, and that this failure can usually be traced to a lack of knowledge and empathy on the part of the providing organisation. 'Gender mainstreaming' (or `gender balancing', which can be understood as ensuring that women enter decision-making processes at all levels) grew from insights such as these, from its adoption at the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women to its dissemination through national governments in Europe and elsewhere. The main part of this chapter, however, is an account of the main themes in the literature on women and transport, mainly from Britain and North America, as well as from continental Europe and Australia. Chapter 4 summarises the rich variety of the data we gained from the focus groups. Much of the analysis of these outputs is in the Appendices. Chapter 5 introduces the Checklist, and suggests a process for its use. Chapter 6 is the heart of the report: the Gender Audit Checklist. Its structure first follows the possible stages of a woman's journey, and then looks at how organisational factors might affect operators' and policy-makers' responses to women's transport needs. Each section of the Checklist begins with some brief notes on the subject: further details are available in the literature report in Chapter 3. Appendix 1 reproduces our Bibliography, which is also available at the Gender Audit website (http://www.women-and-transport.net). Appendix 5 (the `Index') is a detailed list of the contents. The chapters have been written to stand alone. We expect the Checklist in particular to have a life independent of this report. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting