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Gendered mobilities? Engaging the transport academy in repairing a traditional neglect

Gendered mobilities? Engaging the transport academy in repairing a traditional neglect.

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Gendered mobilities? Engaging the transport academy in repairing a traditional neglect

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  1. Gendered mobilities? Engaging the transport academy in repairing a traditional neglect Professor Margaret Grieco, D. Phil. (Oxon.), Professor of Transport and Society, Transport Research Institute, Napier University and Salaried Visiting Full Professor, Institute for African Development, Cornell University Email: m.grieco@napier.ac.uk

  2. Cosmobilities, BasleSeptember 2007

  3. Repairing a traditional neglect • The history of gendered transport provision, patterns and decision is clearly a very long one: technical precision, research and funding for research around this history has been weak and the need for such precision, research and funding has been at best vigorously contested with the ‘scientific’ community being either committed to or content with doing business in the old fashioned, male preferenced way.

  4. Repairing a traditional neglect • This keynote presentation is the outcome of an awareness of the many but highly fragmented and fragmenting attempts made to develop a technical appreciation of the gendered nature of travel and transport and the road blocks which such attempts meet in gaining their full place in the existing scientific literature and in the development of a cumulative scientific specialism of gender and transport.

  5. Repairing a traditional neglect • Despite attempts by agencies such as the World Bank at one time to give gender and transport proper professional place, the transport academy has largely failed to move with the albeit momentary momentum of international institutions to address the gendered character of travel and transport. • The failure to address travel and transport has clear and visible consequences, we would argue, for women’s health, wealth and welfare. • In the developing world, most particularly in Africa, maternal mortality is increasing and the social organisation of transport can be seen to play an important part in this very pernicious social pattern. • In Western societies, women’s travel difficulties in the context of their household and childcare responsibilities generate travel stress, poorer employment opportunities and inadequate access to health care for their own welfare.

  6. Repairing a traditional neglect • This keynote is given in the hope that a focus on ‘cosmobilities’, and indeed on ‘mobilities’, will increasingly be a gendered appreciation of travel and that the development of this social scientific literature and emphasis will place increasing pressure on the transport academy to adjust, correct and rectify the all too apparent existing deficiencies in its treatment of travel and transport.

  7. Repairing a traditional neglect Identifying the obstacles • Institutional history and legacy has considerable consequence for change. The current shape of the transport profession remains skewed towards male authority, position, presence and opportunities. As an outcome, the female gender deficit in the transport profession is highly visible and with the benefits of modern information communication technologies measureable and auditable.

  8. Repairing a traditional neglect • At the edges, there are strategies of mentoring women and in the United States there is some evidence of women moving into leadership positions in transport but these changes do not of themselves guarantee a focus on gender and transport.

  9. Repairing a traditional neglect • A simple analysis of the game logics of the current transport academy would quickly reveal the strength of the pressures to conform away from gendered analysis.

  10. Repairing a traditional neglect Gaps, maps and mishaps • The funding for measuring the gender gaps in both the transport profession and transport organisation and services has been poor. Neverthless, there are now sufficient fragments of evidence and research of this universal situation to make the claim at a scientific level that the systematic mapping of the gendered character of transport provision is long overdue. • Despite the involvement of the international institutions in the gender and transport thematic arena, the on-line comprehensive international data bases of the gendered character of travel and transport are still missing and not even under consideration or construction. The mapping of the evidence is quite simply missing • The focus on projects rather than larger programs and gender and transport portfolios has served to fragment the evidence and as project personnel turn over so to does the evidence and commitment to the construction of a proper scientific basis for gendered transport development planning. This is a major mishap.

  11. Repairing a traditional neglect Best practice, poor patterning • There have been many projects with best practices in respect of gender and transport. But best practices are not replicated, their results fail to find the authoritative publication venues they require in order to get professional attention and the decisionmakers and funders remain ignorant of their existence and local successes. • Best practices do not convert into mainstream patterning without marketing and without the support of champions who already possess authority. Heidelberg’s consultation of women in the design of civic facilities remains an isolated practice; Jauk’s study of the prospects for the gender governance of transport does not get its deserved airing; the World Bank’s previous focus on gender and transport results in a preliminary transport strategy document in 2006 which does not even have gender as a sub heading.

  12. Repairing a traditional neglect • Best practice has given way to poor patterning repeatedly: understandings achieved through high quality research are lost through their position of marginality in literatures which are traditionally skewed to ignore the social aspects of transport in their search for engineering or economic purity. • The social patterning of transport is as important as the physical patterning of terrain and the cost contours of economy. Best engineering practice and best economic practice must take account of social patterning: not to do so is to lose technical proficiency no matter what the historical pattern of the profession permitted or allowed as a practice.

  13. Repairing a traditional neglect New tools, lost chances • The advent of new information communication technologies opens up opportunities for the readier measurement of social dimensions and outcomes of social processes. Not collecting and organising data with regard to gender makes little sense. Having data organised in this fashion, permits the better customisation of transport services and infrastructure to meet the needs of the different segments of the market and community identified through this process. • However, the collection of gender segregated data, the use of gender audits and the use of gender responsive budgets in transport are not mainstream practices. The failure to use such tools represents a major loss of chances for change.

  14. Repairing a traditional neglect • The new information communication technologies may yet play a role in the organising of communities and of women within communities to pressure transport authorities and governments for better transport arrangements for women. The technology certainly enables decision makers to more readily consult with the citizenry. As of yet, we have not seen either transport professionals, transport operators or political decisionmakers make the most of these newly available tools in better integrating gender into transport.

  15. Repairing a traditional neglect • Shaping a field • There are sources of support for the shaping of a field: the admirable John Whitelegg answered a call from Gatnet, the gender and transport network, for publication space and has created the opportunity for a set of special issues on gender and transport to be published. • The Technical University of Braunschweig has competed for and obtained resources to develop the field of gender and transport and continues to make an important contribution in this way. • The Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen obtained EU funding (TRANSGEN) to map the gender gap in transport. • The Ashgate Transport and Society series is publishing a volume edited by Tanu Priya and Tim Cresswell on Gendered mobilities which looks set to provide a benchmark for this field. • A major meeting was recently held in South Africa on gender and transport and the long term pioneers in this area, Professor Kerry Hamilton and Professor Sandra Rosenbloom, continue their work in the field involving a range of institutions through their innovativeness and energy.

  16. Repairing a traditional neglect • But still the story looks like this - the executive team seeking to gain the contract for the UK national transport centre (and they are the last team standing) see no reason to involve women in their leadership team (women after all are only one of six categories of the socially excluded), • The proposal for the centre is deficient in respect of the development of a gender program that will meet women’s needs in Britain (or even identify them) and there appears to be no major funding on any horizon to change the pattern or compensate for the scientific damage done. • A European program of research dedicated to gender and transport is long overdue – the institutions have all paid lip service to the need to meet the gender burden but in fact little has changed and the professional neglect a long way away from repair. • I have some thoughts on how we might move forward: they involve auditing and dedicated funding from the institutions concerned with transport governance.

  17. Repairing a traditional neglect • They involve a more honest scientific assessment of how we arrived in such a skewed position where this is the substance of my keynote and a willingness to correct past damage by professionals. And they involve a new level of attention to the end user and the involvement of participation and feedback in processes which historically have gone sadly awry when left in the hands of the professionals and profiting. • I thank you for your attention and hope for your support in changing the shape of the field.

  18. Repairing a traditional neglect References to follow up: • CATHARINA PURWANI WILLIAMS (2005) 'Knowing one's place': gender, mobility and shifting subjectivity in Eastern Indonesia Global Networks 5 (4), 401–417. doi:10.1111/j.1471-0374.2005.00126.x • http://www.sociology.ku.dk/koordinationen/transgen/documents/Brussels/tanu_priya_uteng.pdf • http://www.sociology.ku.dk/koordinationen/transgen/workshop/presentations/

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