The challenge
Sexual harassment on public transit imposes costs on women commuters, but these costs and the policies meant to address them had not been formally documented.
The case
Issues of sexual harassment on the transit system led the Rio de Janeiro state government to pass a 2006 law requiring train and metro operators to reserve one carriage in each train for women during rush hours (6–9am and 5–8pm). Male compliance is enforced by platform officers without policing powers, whose presence varies across times and stations. In a World Bank working paper, Florence Kondylis, Arianna Legovini, Kate Vyborny, Astrid Zwager and Luiza Andrade crowdsourced information on about 22,000 rides by 357 women commuters on the SuperVia suburban rail system. Women riding in the public space experienced harassment on average once a week, and randomly assigning them to ride in the reserved space reduced physical harassment by 50 percent. Men still made up 29 percent of riders in the reserved space on average, against 58 percent in the public space. Demand for the reserved space was concentrated among a minority of women, and over half of men and women commuters associated women in the public space with more sexual openness.
Why the results were mixed
The authors estimate a lower-bound cost to women of avoiding physical harassment of about $1.45 per incident, and find that perceptions of norms around the reserved space may limit women's agency: women who perceive the prevailing norm to be that women outside it are more sexually open are 79% more likely to report using it.
Sources
- Kondylis, F., Legovini, A., Vyborny, K., Zwager, A., & Andrade, L. (2020). Demand for safe spaces: Avoiding harassment and stigma. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9269.
- Kondylis, F., et al. Demand for safe spaces: Avoiding harassment and stigma (version updated November 2022, PDF).
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