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The future isn’t unisex: Reform’s big gender blind spot
For the past two decades, urban planners and architects in Vienna have been considering how women and men use the city. An article in The Atlantic earlier this year explained that, when asked about their daily lives in a planning survey, “The majority of men reported using either a car or public transit twice a day — to go to work in the morning and come home at night. Women, on the other hand, used the city’s network of sidewalks, bus routes, subway lines and streetcars more frequently and for a myriad reasons.” ”The women had a much more varied pattern of movement,” city administrator Ursula Bauer told the Atlantic. “They were writing things like, ‘I take my kids to the doctor some mornings, then bring them to school before I go to work. Later, I help my mother buy groceries and bring my kids home on the metro.’”
As a result, Vienna is a friendlier city for women and easier and safer for them to navigate. Their use of the city isn’t biological mandated, but squarely pegged to gender roles and their effects, like women’s desire for better lighting to improve their safety. It’s also useful to men who are now more involved in daily child care.
What Vienna did is known as gender mainstreaming. It’s a strategy for creating more equitable societies that fairly allocate resources by considering a diversity of needs. Vienna’s urban planning initiative is a good illustration of how gender mainstreaming not only considers how certain goals impact everyone, but how goals actually change when you give everyone consideration.
The approach, however, is still not typical. Not even in seemingly simple and intuitive ways. For example, until relatively recently, using only male body crash test dummies resulted in the deaths of many more women in car accidents. Having “unisex” military uniforms built for men endangered female soldiers. Thinking of female bodies as exceptional, basically as a preexisting condition, meant our insurance and health care solutions failed us disproportionately. There is no shortage of examples where focusing on the male body alone creates problems or makes existing ones worse.
As a result, Vienna is a friendlier city for women and easier and safer for them to navigate. Their use of the city isn’t biological mandated, but squarely pegged to gender roles and their effects, like women’s desire for better lighting to improve their safety. It’s also useful to men who are now more involved in daily child care.
What Vienna did is known as gender mainstreaming. It’s a strategy for creating more equitable societies that fairly allocate resources by considering a diversity of needs. Vienna’s urban planning initiative is a good illustration of how gender mainstreaming not only considers how certain goals impact everyone, but how goals actually change when you give everyone consideration.
The approach, however, is still not typical. Not even in seemingly simple and intuitive ways. For example, until relatively recently, using only male body crash test dummies resulted in the deaths of many more women in car accidents. Having “unisex” military uniforms built for men endangered female soldiers. Thinking of female bodies as exceptional, basically as a preexisting condition, meant our insurance and health care solutions failed us disproportionately. There is no shortage of examples where focusing on the male body alone creates problems or makes existing ones worse.
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/19/the_future_isnt_unisex_reforms_big_gender_blind_spot/