Who Owns Public Spaces: How City Design Reinforces Inequality

Public bathrooms are just one in a series of unfortunate examples of the reinforcement of inequality by the design of public spaces that caters to men's bodies or ignore women's needs. Public city spaces should be equally accessible, useable and beneficial to both men and women. For this to be the case, the differences between men and women must be taken into consideration during the design of urban spaces. With widespread female migration to cities from rural communities, women's increasing participation in both economic and political spheres and the pledge to equality by many of the world's governments, cities must become safer, more equal places, and actively seek to avoid propagating structural inequality. 

Inevitably, where there are washrooms, their square footage is similar for both sexes. Differences in bodily functions, however, mean men's washrooms have more urinals per square foot than women's washrooms have available stalls, resulting in different experience and usability for the sexes. Women, because of cities designed primarily around men's bodies have far more needs for washrooms: menstruation and diaper changing, breast-feeding and more frequent urination due to smaller bladders and pregnancy, tending to both children and older, sicker relatives (as women take on the bulk of the care for both these groups more than men). 

New Brunswick Denies Women's Rights as Abortion Clinic Prepares to Close

Women’s reproductive control is still a highly contentious issue in many parts of the world, and as we have seen through recent Supreme Court decisions in the United States, the divisive issue is not solely one for developing nations. 

As women are painted as second-class citizens, subject to prejudice and sexual harassment, unable to access consistent and affordable birth control and with their bodies seen as familial or spousal property, the consequences are often that unplanned pregnancies are high and unsafe abortions prevail. India is a prime example: although the country allows for abortion on broad grounds, it still accounts for exorbitantly high numbers of deaths and complications due to unsafe procedures, with accounts of one woman dying every two hours as a result. 

Working Women: The Gendered Nature of Time Poverty

Poverty, as we are discovering, is far more complex than financial scarcity. It is a multi-dimensional structure with cross-cutting issues that affect every facet of a person's life: from their employment benefits and likelihood of upward mobility to their health and trust in doctors, from their parenting skills to their children's language skills, from their ability to process information to their ability to make good decisions. Poverty is the overall blanket that smothers a person's life in a self-perpetuating and compounding way.

Development workers have long known of 'time poverty,' a concept only now being understood in a Western poverty context. Poor people live on borrowed time that they will never, if rarely, be able to make up: the more problems happening in the moment, the less I can concentrate on the future, and the more pressing the issues (bills, food, health), the more time and concentration I give to them, resulting in bad long terms decisions in order to fulfill the immediate need. This is the 'bandwidth' part of time poverty. The second, physical, is measured in hours: poverty compounds activity: not only is my mind taken up with pressing issues of survival, but my body is taken up with working, overworking and the inability to come in some way to relieve the pressures of never being able to stop working. Relaxation, vacations, time off, these are luxuries of the rich - time that is too costly to waste for the poor.

Street Harassment: Women and the Dangers of Public Spaces

Can we be held morally responsible for our actions? If we are dealt a set of experiences and characteristics shaped by our formative childhood years, are our adult choices not a series of actions pre-determined by those characteristics or influenced by them in some way?

The problems arise when actions affects other people - and societal norms demand laws and social conduct that respects and protects the safety, both physical and mental, of each of its citizens. So although we may have impulses, desires and thoughts that would lead us to act in aggressive manners, for the social cohesion and growth, we cannot allow those actions to run amuck. Except, it seems, when it comes to violence against women. Half of Canadian women will report being physically or sexually abused after the age of 16. On average, every six days a woman is murdered by her partner. Yearly, 40 000 arrests are made due to domestic violence, about 12% of all violent crime - but since only 22% of incidents are reported - the cases of abuse are much higher.

Presumed Consent is Killing Equality

IN Swaziland, teenage girls are taught about sexually transmitted diseases, condoms and HIV testing information handed out at will as they learn that sex is dangerous and mostly for men.  In India, The Justice Verma Committee’s recommendation on recognizing marital rape as an offence under criminal law was hastily swept aside by the Standing Committee on Home, on the basis that 'marriage presumes consent.' And a few weeks ago, in the HBO series Girls, Adam raped his girlfriend Natalia onscreen. Or did he? It was, according to Slate, at the very least, “uncomfortable.”  Or maybe it was a violation and “something she didn’t like?" 

All three of these situations highlight an unspoken topic in the fight against rape and sexual abuse: the presumed notion of consent.

What does Language Have to do with Sexism?

We learn quickly that language is gendered. We learn words associated with boys (dominant, blue, strong, independent, leader, fearless) and those with girls (fun, pink, shopping, dancing, smiles, pretty). This gendered division of language grows only further and affects a variety of fields that shape the interactions between the sexes. 

Religion – still a common part of our lives, is predominantly neglectful of a written female presence. Even if we try to disassociate ourselves from the physical male stronghold over religious institutions – we cannot help but read that God’s maleness is the overarching source of divinity in most, if not all, global religious texts. Can a woman see herself in the divine if she has not been written in it? Where, in the holy books, has she been aptly portrayed? Is she worth anything more than her tightly constrained roles as either virgin or whore?

Gendered language can motivate our actions and alter our perceptions of self and of others. We take for granted that our social interactions, governed partly through common language, are the only way we can interact with each other, and we blindly use terms that cement negative gender roles and engender unequal distributions of power.

Roe v. Wade At 40: The Struggle to Save a Woman's Right to Choose

In 1973, the United States Supreme Court declared that privacy as defined under the due process clause of 14th Amendment of the US Constitution extended to a woman's right over her own body and her decision whether or not to have an abortion. Basically, it disallowed many State and Federal actions against abortion, and tied the procedure to viability.

40 years on, despite being a constitutionally protected right, a woman's choice is still vehemently attacked by State law and physical violence that roams the scale from intimidation to murder. From South Dakota where a federal appeals court upheld a law requiring doctors to state that abortion cause a rise in suicide attempts (which John Hopkins has stated is absolutely bogus), to North Dakota where medication-indcued abortions have been banned despite medical testimony to their safety, to Kansas where Dr. Tiller was shot and the doctors who attempted to take over his practise where physically harassed into quitting, to Mississippi where the last abortion clinic is closing because hospitals won't grant obligatory admitting privileges to it's doctors, to Virginia where abortion clinics now have to abide by architectural zoning laws for their patient's safety (though no previous reports suggested the clinics were unsafe), and I could go on: abortion providers have been physically harassed into oblivion.

The Elections and the Problem with the Female Vote

The election cycle in the US has been replete with one-dimensional messages about the women's vote being a deciding factor in the outcome. Obligatory pandering has included Mitt Romney's binders and President Obama's overflow of pro-women's rights ads, with polls analyzing the norms of what the swinging women's vote will mean for both candidates: if only women voted, President Obama would win by a landslide.

In the United States, voting blocks are the norm. Compartmentalized into even more specific groupings than society already creates and assigned characteristics from which they cannot subtract themselves, these interest groups churn out statistics and variations in polls that the media enthusiastically reports on, fitting people into digestible boxes. And yet, as has become clear through a closer examination of cross-cutting segments of these voting blocks, too many issues are at play to keep such a generalized partitioning of social groups.