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). 

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.

Women in the Workplace, the Gender Confidence Gap and #YesAllWomen

Last week, four important studies brought conclusions relating to women in the workplace. These were not about editors Jill Abramson unceremoniously fired from the NYTimes nor Natalie Nougayrède forced out of her position at Le Monde, although they provide a perfect backdrop. Two of the studies demonstrate how, at either end of the corporate ladder, women are subjected to gender-based inequalities and punishments, these then intersect with a prevalent and detrimental gender confidence gap, and, finally, come to rest in the US government's medical research agency's (NIH) decision to erase sex bias from their biomedical studies.

The first study, from the University of Victoria and the Canadian Intern Association shows that the majority of interns in Canada are young women, who are unpaid or are making less than the minimum wage. Around 300 000 young Canadians work unpaid, and the vast majority are women - 49% in the private sector and 25/26% between the public and not for profit sector. While the Conservative government has provided funding towards "high-demand" internships in the fields of sciences, maths and computers, it has given nothing to more 'traditionally female' fields of nutritional sciences, teaching or social work.

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.

A Woman's Education, A Woman's Body

Education, being a historically male privilege, had its bouts of serving women's fortunes: the 1500-1600's in Europe were a fruitful time for women, where the renaissance meant women could seize different powers in the forms of knowledge of the arts and sciences, literature and politics. The era brought with it a great many female rulers and a decline in mass violence, where kingdoms sought reforms of justice and increased education as higher goals. In this time, it was written, in The Instruction of a Christian Woman by Juan Vives in 1520:

"But she shall leave all such light and trifling pleasures, wherein the light fantasies of maids have delight, as songs, dances and other such wanton and peevish plays. A woman, saith Plutarch, given unto learning, will never delight in dancing. 

But here peradventure a man would ask, what learning a woman should be set unto, and what she shall study? I have told you: the study of wisdom, the which doth instruct their manners and inform their living, and teacheth them the way of good and holy life. As for eloquence, I have no great care, nor a woman needith it not, but she needeth goodness and wisdom.”

The 1600's in Western Europe saw the downfall of women's education and women's rule: violence accrued and royalty pushed their troops into battle. Military leaders were now only male, and as women were forced out of the public realms that previous education had enabled them access, they were now seen as unfit to rule over wars - quite the opposite of the previous century's powerful commanders including Mary Queen of Scots or Catherine de' Medici.

Reflecting on the degradation of female royalty in this era, it was Mary Wollstonecraft that wrote, in 1792, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women: 

"Women are in this deplorable state everywhere, because truth is hidden from them so as to preserve their ‘innocence’ (the polite name for ignorance), and they are made to take on an artificial character before their faculties have acquired any strength. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming around in its gilt cage it only seeks to adorn its prison.

Women's Issues are About Men Too

As with time, I'm a bit obsessed with language. I strongly believe that healthy and developed communication is the key to our interactions, and I am especially interested in how language can shape our perceptions and actions. This is true within several dynamic issues in the 'women's rights' realm.

It's time to admit and actively advocate that 'women's issues' stop being such a gendered thematic. Education, daycare, women's health and violence against women are as much men's issues as they are the women's. But as we devolve the language around these subjects into purely female words and experiences, we not only remove men from the dialogue, but from any actionable involvement and solution as well.

The US Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments in the Hobby Lobby case, pitting the Affordable Care Act against a woman's access to contraception. In short, if the Justices favour the department store's arguments, they will be allowing, for the first time, a for-profit corporation to claim religious rights and protections which may then directly prevent insurance from covering women's access to birth control, if these corporations can prove that such coverage is a 'substantial religious burden.'

Women's Voices in Social Media: International Women's Day

I recently spoke at a Conference on Women's Voices in Social Media, hosted by The Canadian Federation for University Women at Trent University in Peterborough. It was a lively and important discussion, and I was able to sit on a panel with brilliant speakers who touched on many aspects of the challenges and opportunities for women online and the policy reform and state role in criminalizing certain behaviors.

Below is part of my speech and more after the break. Saturday is International Women's Day - and in an era where our digital connectivity has become synonymous with our 'real world' selves, women must be empowered to be active participants and creators of information and not simply passive consumers.

The Way the Internet Looks at Women

Women's representation in the media goes beyond what we see on television or in magazines and billboards. It is in our every day use of that media, and specifically, the internet. Indeed, it is in these seemingly innocuous daily uses that we become immune to the ways these images influence our perception of a woman's value, position and role.

Check out some of these images when googling terms like 'woman' (all white and highly sexualized poses), or 'working woman' (mainly white and behind a computer, with some frustrated and anxious looks thrown in for good measure), or 'young girls' (again, mainly white, and frighteningly sexualized).

Can she have it all? Who knows!!

Getty Images, the largest online stockpile of useable photos (all those pictures you see on websites), has teamed up with LeanIn.org to change the way women are portrayed on the internet. Do you remember women laughing alone with salad? Or women sitting rather uncomfortably with computers? Or feminism according to Stock photography?

Woody Allen, Dylan Farrow and Rape Culture

When we're children, we're often asked what we want to be when we grow up.
A doctor? An astronaut? As we age, these questions evolve: How many children do you want? What kind of partner do you want to have? In what kind of society do you want to live?

That last question is often the root of our happiness. Will we live in a society that values a good work/life balance? One that values rights and freedoms, that makes room for diversity and culture and religion? We want to live in societies that fit well with who we are and want to be. We can often evaluate societies when we look to the people at the top: those we promote as our leaders, our mentors, our role models and heroes.

The questions asks itself: Who do we want to glorify as representing the very best of ourselves? What kinds of people do we want? Do we want our sports stars, our media stars, our politicians, our leaders to be of sound moral character? How do we define that? And how lenient are we: How much rope do we give until we decide they've hung themselves completely?

Woody Allen was honored with a lifetime achievement award at the recent 71st Golden Globes awards for his work in film. This reignited the debate on the allegations of sexual abuse made against the filmmaker by both his stepdaughter Dylan Farrow and her mother, Mia. Noticing there was an important voice missing, Nicolas Kristoff at the NYTimes, published the following open letter, written by Dylan Farrow, describing her rape at the hands of her stepfather when she was 7 years of age.

6 Gifts for a Feminist New Year

Every year I write a holiday gift list. Here's the one this year needs.

Fair and decent representation in the media

In 2014, I'd like to open a magazine without worrying about my thigh gap or my six pack. I'd like to see women of all shapes and sizes and colours represented on my TV screen and in my movie theatres. I'd like the Bechdel test to become obsolete, because of course women talk to each other in movies and of course  its not only about men. In the news, I'd like women to be treated as equals by their male counterparts and not have themselves or their opinions degraded, shamed or belittled simply because they are women. When women run for office, have babies, wear dresses, eat food or exist in the public realm, I'd love if we didn't shame their bodies, dress choices, food consumption or general behaviour based on their gender. When Hilary runs for President in 2016, I can only pray I don't read a million articles on her pantsuits, her haircuts, and how she can be so 'manly' or, conversely, so 'womanly'.

Women are not victims

Under my Christmas tree I'd like an absence of victim blaming. When a woman gets raped or abused in 2013, I'd love if we didn't hint that maybe alcohol/short skirts/flirting or, more generally, having a vagina made him do it. Lets not state that because the woman is fat/skinny/black/white/etc. she should enjoy it because no one would look at her otherwise. Please stop making the streets, stores, busses and clubs I enter into soft war zones: I can do well without the catcalling, the general harassment, the touching and the leering. I know its difficult: many men grow up being told that power and strength are the most valuable assets, that women are possessions to be taken and controlled and that their maleness is defined by their last dollar or last sexual encounter. But these things are simply not true. I promise to respect you as a being capable of the full range of human emotions; so please respect me as one too.

More female superheroes (or:A seat at the table)

When Hilary Clinton runs for the Presidency in 2016, women in the United States will rise in such unprecedented numbers, the government will have to retake the census. We need more women in visible positions of power, more women who have decision-making power: who are part of political, economic and legislative processes from their inception to their implementation and beyond. We need strong women from all walks of life to be seen as capable and powerful so that young girls can grow up knowing that women can access many different ranks, that there is no glass ceiling that impedes them, that they really can do anything, be anyone. When young girls stop wanting to be president by the time they are 15, when they fail drastically at maths and sciences due in large part to external factors, when their chief concerns turn to body image and getting a man's attention, we have failed future generations of female leaders by not showing or giving them opportunities or images of female success. And by doing this, we have failed future generation of boys and the relationships, friendships and partnerships they could be having with equally competent, intelligent, ambitious and successful women. Never underestimate the power of mentors, heroines and superheroes. (My current favorite is Qahera, a Muslim feminist superhero.)

Dispelling the Notion that Women and Men Can't be Friends

Women and men can't be friends. And, women and women can't be friends.  The different sexes can't intermix beyond their biological impulses, and women can't get passed the cattiness and the competition - they can't be real friends - not like men can. After all, its probably a man who will get in the way. This is rubbish, and an archaic view of female and male gender roles that inhibits the entire expression of self and possibility of friendly relations between the sexes. Indeed, patriarchal structures are alive and thriving in beliefs and statements such as these. It reduces women and men to animals, with no interest in anything more than playing out normalized and expected gender roles.

Fitness Competitions: A dissection of fitness, health and beauty ideals

It seemed farcical. An ardent women’s rights advocate, and outspoken feminist, especially on body issues, I would be entering a fitness competition where winning meant being judged solely on appearance, presence and onstage personality. 12 weeks later, I've rarely been so humbled. Stepping on stage for the first time, I took first place in the morning Open division against 30 other fantastic women, and then 1st overall in the Elite division at night, winning my pro card.  

Second Generation Gender Bias

I’ve written before that public spaces can sometimes imitate soft war zones for women. Men belong in these places while women are visiting, often without permission. Cat-calling, space-taking... women are made to feel like outsiders in a space that should be their own. We use these spaces to get to work, to do our daily outings, we use them for protest, to express ourselves but also for leisure and family time. If one sex feels pushed out of these spaces, their access to these different aspects of life also suffers. We saw in the Arab uprisings, how women were an important part of the protests, and how this pointed to a gendered reclaiming of public spaces as an important component of the female emancipation process. 

Second generation gender bias is the official term for this feeling. That feeling that as women, we don’t quite belong in certain places or in certain roles. Public transport and public spaces more broadly, but boardrooms and positions of power more significantly. 

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.

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.

Saudi Arabia has Two Female Athletes Competing at the Olympics

This year marks the first year that all of the more than 200 countries represented at the Olympics have a female athlete as part of their delegation. Specifically, this year, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Brunei all included women in the London Games.

Saudi Arabia sent 2 (judo (who may be forced to compete without her headscarf - this is a move away from recent positive developments accommodating the wearing of religious clothing and thus improving the inclusion of all women in sport, although safety is a concern. ) and an 800 metre runner)
Brunei sent 1 (400m hurdler)
Qatar sent 3 (swimmer, sprinter and flag bearer)