Gender Discrimination in the Transportation Ecosystem: Why Mobility Is Not Gender-Neutral | The Unequal Journey

Engr. Kamran Abbas

BSc Civil Engineering

MS Transportation Engineering

Introduction: Why Transportation Is Not Gender-Neutral
The Transportation Ecosystem: More Than Roads and Vehicles
Equal Infrastructure Does Not Mean Equal Mobility
The Unequal Journey: Gender and Travel Behaviour
Mobility of Care and the Hidden Complexity of Trip Chaining
Traffic Safety vs. Personal Security
Harassment, Fear and Suppressed Mobility
The First- and Last-Mile Problem
Designing Safer Public Transport Environments
Why Infrastructure Alone Cannot Solve the Problem
The Data Gap: Who Is Missing From the Transport Dataset?
Gender, Intersectionality and Unequal Mobility
Women in the Transportation Workforce
The Economics of Restricted Mobility
From Infrastructure Outputs to Equitable Mobility Outcomes
How Transportation Engineers Can Integrate Gender Into Project Design
Smart Mobility, AI and the Future of Gender-Responsive Transportation
Conclusion: From Equal Infrastructure to Equitable Mobility
References

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Introduction: Asphalt may be neutral. Transportation systems are not.

A road does not know whether the person walking beside it is a man or a woman. A bus does not know the gender of its passenger. A railway platform does not distinguish between a commuter, a caregiver, a student, or a worker. But the transportation system surrounding those physical assets can affect different people very differently. This distinction is fundamental.

Transportation engineering has traditionally been dominated by measurable physical quantities:

traffic volume;
passenger volume;
vehicle-kilometres;
average travel time;
travel speed;
intersection delay;
level of service;
road capacity;
public transport frequency;
accessibility distance;
crash rates.

These indicators remain essential. But they do not tell the whole story. Two people may technically have access to the same bus route while experiencing completely different levels of mobility. One may walk 500 meters to the stop without concern, board the first bus available, travel after dark and arrive home safely.

Another may choose a longer route, avoid the same stop after sunset, wait for a different service, pay more for a taxi, travel only during daylight, or abandon the journey altogether because of harassment, poor lighting, inadequate pedestrian infrastructure, overcrowding, caregiving responsibilities or fear.

The infrastructure is nominally the same. The mobility outcome is not.

This is why gender should not be treated as a social issue external to transportation engineering. It is a transport planning, design, operations, accessibility, safety, data and governance issue. The World Bank explicitly recognizes that women and men can have different mobility needs and patterns, while recent research continues to find gender-related differences in travel behaviour, first- and last-mile barriers, safety perceptions and access to public transport.

The first engineering mistake: assuming that equal infrastructure produces equal mobility

A conventional planning question might be:

Does this neighbourhood have access to public transport?

A more sophisticated question is:

Who can actually use that transport, under what conditions, at what cost, at what time, and with what level of safety and reliability?

That difference separates nominal accessibility from effective accessibility.

Consider two residents living 500 metres from a bus stop.

Factor	Passenger A	Passenger B
Distance to stop	500 m	500 m
Sidewalk	Available	Available
Bus service	Available	Available
Fare	Affordable	Affordable
Trip timing	Daytime	Early morning/evening
Trip purpose	Direct commute	Work + childcare + shopping
Waiting environment	Comfortable	Poorly lit/isolated
Perceived personal security	High	Low
Need to carry children/goods	No	Sometimes
Practical mobility	High	Potentially constrained

From a conventional network model, both passengers are “served.” From a human-mobility perspective, they are not necessarily receiving the same transportation opportunity. This is the central problem with treating transport access as a purely geometric concept. A bus stop’s existence does not prove that the bus stop is usable.

Gender affects travel behaviour—but gender is not destiny

It is important to avoid another analytical mistake. There is no single “female travel pattern.” Women are not a homogeneous transportation category. Travel behaviour can vary substantially according to:

age;
income;
disability;
employment;
household structure;
location;
vehicle ownership;
childcare responsibilities;
cultural and social norms;
occupation;
time of day;
safety conditions.

Research nevertheless identifies recurring differences in many contexts.

Women may make more complex journeys involving multiple purposes, including employment, education, shopping, healthcare and household or caregiving responsibilities. Recent reviews of urban public transport in developing countries have also identified shorter, more frequent and more complex trips among women in many settings.

The important engineering lesson is therefore not:

“Women travel this way.”

It is:

Transport demand is heterogeneous, and gender can be one of the variables explaining that heterogeneity.

That is a much stronger analytical position.

The trip is often not home → work → home

For decades, transport planning has often been heavily influenced by the conventional commuter journey:

Home → Work → Home

But real urban mobility can look more like:

Home → School → Childcare → Work → Market → Healthcare → Home

or:

Home → Work → Grocery → Elder-care → Home

These linked journeys are commonly described as trip chaining and are closely connected with the concept of mobility of care. The distinction matters because a network optimized around one large peak-hour commute can perform poorly for a person making several shorter trips.

A simple transport-chain model

                 ┌──────────────┐
                 │     HOME     │
                 └──────┬───────┘
                        │
                        ▼
                 ┌──────────────┐
                 │    SCHOOL    │
                 └──────┬───────┘
                        │
                        ▼
                 ┌──────────────┐
                 │   CHILDCARE  │
                 └──────┬───────┘
                        │
                        ▼
                 ┌──────────────┐
                 │     WORK     │
                 └──────┬───────┘
                        │
              ┌─────────┴─────────┐
              ▼                   ▼
        ┌───────────┐       ┌───────────┐
        │  MARKET   │       │ HEALTHCARE │
        └─────┬─────┘       └─────┬─────┘
              │                   │
              └─────────┬─────────┘
                        ▼
                 ┌──────────────┐
                 │     HOME     │
                 └──────────────┘

This is not merely a social-planning observation.

It has engineering implications for:

pedestrian network connectivity;
bus stop spacing;
interchange design;
transfer penalties;
service frequency;
timetable coordination;
vehicle accessibility;
station elevators and ramps;
sidewalk width;
curb design;
stroller and luggage accommodation;
fare structures;
first- and last-mile connectivity.

A transport system designed around a single-purpose commute can therefore underperform for people whose daily mobility is multi-purpose.

Care work has a transportation footprint

Caregiving is not geographically stationary. Taking a child to school, accompanying an elderly relative to healthcare, purchasing household supplies or collecting a child from childcare all generate physical movement. This creates a transportation relationship between unpaid care work and mobility.

The World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law 2024 reported that women spend, on average, 2.4 more hours per day on unpaid care work than men, although this is a global average and not a universal individual pattern. That statistic matters to transport planners because time spent on care can change:

departure times;
destination sequences;
mode choice;
trip frequency;
acceptable transfer times;
willingness to walk;
affordability constraints.

Consequently, transport planning and childcare, education, healthcare and land-use planning cannot always be treated as independent systems.

The location of essential services is itself a transportation variable.

Safety is not one variable: traffic safety and personal security are different problems

This distinction is one of the most important technical improvements transportation professionals can make.

Traffic safety

Traffic safety primarily concerns risks such as:

vehicle-pedestrian collisions;
vehicle-bicycle collisions;
intersection crashes;
road departure;
unsafe speeds;
inadequate sight distance;
geometric deficiencies.

Personal security

Personal security includes risks such as:

sexual harassment;
assault;
intimidation;
unwanted contact;
stalking;
robbery;
threatening behaviour;
unsafe waiting environments.

They can overlap spatially, but they are not the same phenomenon. A pedestrian facility can be compliant with a road-design standard and still feel unsafe because of isolation, poor visibility or lack of access to assistance. Conversely, a brightly lit street can still have dangerous vehicle speeds.

Therefore:

A safe transport system must address both the probability of traffic injury and the user’s exposure to interpersonal threats.

The OECD/International Transport Forum has identified safety and security as major factors influencing women’s transport behaviour, while UN Women has documented the importance of conditions around transport stops and pedestrian access routes.

The journey to the bus stop may be the weakest link

Public transport is not a single facility.

It is a chain:

Origin → sidewalk → crossing → bus stop/station → waiting area → vehicle → interchange → destination → final walking segment

A failure at any link can reduce the usefulness of the entire system. This is particularly important for first- and last-mile travel.

A 2024 systematic review of 42 studies examining women’s first- and last-mile mobility in low- and middle-income countries identified recurring barriers involving public transport, non-motorized transport, safety, gendered norms, urban form and policy.

Therefore, the question:

“How far is the house from the station?”

is incomplete.

A better accessibility assessment asks:

How difficult, safe, affordable and reliable is the entire journey from origin to destination?

The bus stop is not just a point on a map

A bus stop is often represented in transport models as a node. For the passenger, it is an environment. That environment can include:

pedestrian approach;
crossing facilities;
lighting;
shelter;
seating;
visibility;
surrounding land use;
crowding;
information;
emergency communication;
staff presence;
surveillance;
accessibility for children and people with disabilities.

UN Women safety audits have specifically highlighted lighting, visibility, walkability, access to help and the physical condition of spaces around transport facilities as important considerations.

This leads to an important design principle:

The effective boundary of a public transport facility extends beyond the vehicle and platform.

The access route and surrounding public realm are part of the passenger experience.

Lighting matters—but “add more lights” is not a complete safety strategy

Lighting is frequently presented as the solution to women’s safety. That is too simplistic. Good lighting can improve visibility and contribute to a more usable environment. But lighting alone cannot eliminate harassment, assault or intimidation. A more complete security strategy may combine:

Physical measures

appropriate lighting;
unobstructed sightlines;
maintained sidewalks;
safe crossings;
visible entrances and exits;
suitable station layouts;
functioning emergency equipment.

Operational measures

trained staff;
reliable service;
crowd management;
appropriate staffing at vulnerable locations;
clear procedures for incidents.

Institutional measures

reporting channels;
complaint tracking;
investigation procedures;
accountability;
coordination between operators, police and local authorities.

Social measures

public awareness;
behaviour-change campaigns;
community participation;
education.

World Bank and UN Women case studies emphasize this multi-layered approach rather than treating infrastructure as a standalone solution.

Harassment can change the transport network without changing the network map

This is one of the most underappreciated issues.

Imagine a city has:

a bus route every 10 minutes;
a stop 400 metres from a residential area;
a pedestrian connection;
affordable fares.

On paper, the service is excellent. But if passengers consistently avoid that stop because of harassment, the effective network is different.

The formal network says:

Residential area → Bus Stop A → City Centre

The experienced network may be:

Residential area → longer walk → Bus Stop B → more expensive route

or:

Residential area → private vehicle/taxi → destination

or even:

Residential area → no trip

This produces a concept that deserves greater attention in transport research:

Behaviourally constrained accessibility

Traditional accessibility measures often calculate whether a destination can be reached within a particular time or distance. But effective accessibility should also consider whether people are willing and able to use the available route.

A conceptual formulation could be written as:

A_eff = A_physical × F_affordability × F_reliability × F_security × F_usability

where each factor represents a constraint between 0 and 1. This is not a universally standardized accessibility equation; it is a conceptual engineering framework illustrating the problem. A destination that is physically accessible but practically unusable should not be treated as fully accessible.

The data problem: what transport agencies do not measure can disappear

Traditional transport datasets may tell us:

how many people boarded a bus;
how many vehicles used a road;
how long a trip took;
which route was used.

But they may not tell us:

who avoided the route;
who changed departure time because of safety;
who abandoned a trip;
who took a more expensive mode;
who avoided public transport after dark;
who experienced harassment;
who is carrying children or goods;
who has to make multiple linked trips.

This creates a major methodological problem.

Observed travel ≠ unconstrained travel demand

If someone does not make a journey, a conventional dataset may record zero trips.

But zero can represent several different realities:

No need for the trip

Trip made by another mode

Trip postponed

Trip cancelled

Trip never attempted because the perceived cost or risk was too high. The last categories can be invisible in conventional traffic counts. This is why the World Bank has repeatedly identified data gaps as a major constraint to understanding differentiated mobility needs.

What should a gender-responsive transport dataset contain?

A modern transport agency should move beyond simply counting male and female passengers.

Useful data dimensions can include:

Dimension	Examples of variables
Sex/gender	Sex-disaggregated travel data; inclusive demographic categories where appropriate
Age	Child, youth, adult, older adult
Disability	Functional accessibility requirements
Income	Household/income group
Trip purpose	Work, education, care, healthcare, shopping, recreation
Trip chaining	Number and sequence of linked activities
Mode	Walk, bicycle, bus, rail, taxi, private vehicle
Time	Departure, arrival, waiting and transfer times
Cost	Fare, parking, taxi/private-vehicle costs
First/last mile	Distance, walking conditions, transfer requirements
Safety	Perceived security and actual incidents
Harassment	Type, location, time, reporting outcome
Service quality	Crowding, reliability, frequency
Accessibility	Barrier-free access, stroller/child mobility, disability access
Spatial context	Station, stop, corridor, neighbourhood

The World Bank’s recent transport work and UN Women guidance both emphasize the importance of collecting and using sex-disaggregated and gender-responsive mobility information.

An evidence snapshot

The following figures illustrate why gender and transportation cannot be separated from broader questions of safety, care and mobility.

Evidence	Finding	Transportation relevance
Economies assessed by WBL 2024	190	Global legal comparison
Economies with laws prohibiting sexual harassment in employment	151	Shows that workplace protection is much more common than public-space protection
Economies with laws prohibiting sexual harassment in public spaces	39	Public transport and public-space safety gap
Global WBL Safety score	36/100	Legal protection remains weak across measured dimensions
Additional unpaid care work by women	2.4 hours/day	Helps explain differentiated time and trip patterns
World Bank transport projects, FY2019–24	159	Scale of recent transport investment examined
Those projects incorporating gender-gap measures	94%	Gender is increasingly being integrated into transport investment

Sources: World Bank Women, Business and the Law 2024; World Bank transport/gender programme data.

The Public-Space Protection Gap

190 economies assessed

Sexual-harassment protection in law

Employment / workplace
151  ████████████████████████████████████████

Public spaces
 39  ██████████

The comparison is striking: in the 2024 World Bank assessment, 151 of 190 economies had laws prohibiting sexual harassment in employment, while only 39 had laws prohibiting it in public spaces. Public transport is explicitly included among the public-space contexts relevant to this issue.

Important: these figures measure legal frameworks, not the actual prevalence of harassment or the actual safety experienced by passengers.

Gender discrimination in transportation is not limited to passengers

There is another dimension that transport engineering discussions sometimes overlook:

Who gets to work in the transportation system?

Transportation is also a labour market.

Women remain underrepresented in many transport occupations, including:

driving;
vehicle maintenance;
road construction;
traffic operations;
engineering;
logistics;
management;
senior technical positions.

The OECD/ITF reports substantial gender imbalance in transport employment, including women representing only around 22% of transport employees in the European Union in the data it cites. This matters for two reasons. First, employment in transportation is itself an economic opportunity. Second, a workforce that does not adequately represent the users it serves may have fewer perspectives available during:

planning;
design;
operations;
customer service;
safety auditing;
policy development.

Representation is not a substitute for technical competence. But diverse technical teams can identify problems that homogeneous teams may overlook.

The engineering response should not be “women-only infrastructure”

A poorly designed gender strategy can create another problem: stereotyping. The objective should not be to assume that women are universally vulnerable, passive or dependent. Nor should the objective be to build an entirely separate transportation system for women. Some targeted interventions may be justified in particular contexts—for example, dedicated services or priority arrangements where evidence demonstrates a specific safety problem.

But the larger objective should be:

Make the mainstream transportation system safe, accessible, affordable and usable for diverse users.

That means asking whether infrastructure works for:

women and men;
children;
older adults;
people with disabilities;
caregivers;
low-income passengers;
people travelling outside peak hours;
people carrying goods;
people making complex trip chains.

Recent World Bank work similarly frames the challenge as addressing gaps between women and men across mobility, employment and entrepreneurship rather than simply creating isolated “women’s transport” interventions.

Intersectionality changes the engineering problem

Gender does not operate independently of other characteristics. A low-income woman travelling with two children at night may experience the transport system very differently from a high-income professional travelling alone during daylight.

Similarly, an older woman with a disability may face barriers that have little relationship to the experience of a younger passenger.

Important interacting variables include:

Gender + Age + Income + Disability + Caregiving + Location + Time + Mode

This is why a single average statistic can be misleading.

A city might report:

“Average walking distance to public transport = 450 m.”

But that average may hide:

300 m for one neighbourhood;
700 m for another;
an inaccessible route for wheelchair users;
a poorly lit route at night;
steep terrain;
unsafe crossings;
missing sidewalks.

The same principle applies to gender.

Disaggregated data is not a luxury. It is a way of preventing averages from hiding inequality.

What should modern transport design actually change?

A gender-responsive approach should influence the entire project lifecycle.

Stage 1 — Planning

Before deciding what to build, ask:

Who currently uses the network?
Who does not?
What trips are being made?
What trips are missing?
When do people travel?
Why do people choose one mode over another?
What safety concerns affect route and mode choice?

Stage 2 — Data collection

Conduct:

sex-disaggregated travel surveys;
passenger intercept surveys;
household travel surveys;
origin-destination surveys;
safety perception surveys;
harassment reporting analysis;
first/last-mile audits;
time-of-day analysis;
trip-chain analysis.

Quantitative surveys should be complemented by qualitative methods because a traffic count can tell us how much, while interviews and safety audits can help explain why.

Stage 3 — Network design

Evaluate:

stop locations;
route connectivity;
transfer requirements;
service frequency;
operating hours;
first/last-mile connections;
pedestrian accessibility;
fare structures.

A route that ends service at 20:00 may technically provide transit but offer very limited mobility to workers finishing late shifts.

Stage 4 — Infrastructure design

Assess:

lighting;
visibility;
pedestrian continuity;
crossings;
shelter;
seating;
platform access;
emergency communication;
station entrances/exits;
toilets where appropriate;
universal accessibility;
stroller and child-related needs.

Stage 5 — Operations

Design for:

reliable service;
manageable crowding;
trained operators;
incident response;
complaint handling;
emergency procedures;
passenger information;
monitoring of high-risk locations and periods.

Stage 6 — Evaluation

Do not stop at:

“The road was constructed.”

or:

“The bus route is operating.”

Measure outcomes such as:

ridership by demographic group;
accessibility;
waiting time;
trip completion;
mode choice;
perceived safety;
reported incidents;
service reliability;
affordability;
access to employment and services.

This converts gender-responsive transportation from a policy slogan into an engineering performance framework.

A better definition of transportation accessibility

Traditional accessibility can be thought of approximately as:

Accessibility = f(time, distance, cost, connectivity)

But for inclusive mobility, a more complete conceptual model is:

Effective Accessibility = f(physical access, time, cost, reliability, safety, security, usability, information)

Again, this is a conceptual framework rather than a universally accepted standard equation.

The important insight is that physical proximity is only one component of accessibility.

A station can be 400 metres away and still have poor effective accessibility if the route is:

disconnected;
inaccessible;
unaffordable;
unreliable;
excessively crowded;
perceived as unsafe;
unsuitable for the user’s trip purpose.

The economics are larger than transportation

This issue is sometimes incorrectly framed as simply:

“Women need safer buses.”

The economic implications are much broader.

Transportation determines access to:

employment;
education;
healthcare;
markets;
social networks;
public services.

When mobility barriers restrict those opportunities, transportation can become a mechanism through which existing economic inequalities are reinforced. The World Bank’s transport research explicitly connects inadequate transportation with women’s access to education, employment and healthcare. This means a transportation project can generate benefits that do not appear in a conventional vehicle-based cost-benefit analysis.

For example:

better transport → greater mobility → greater access to jobs → increased economic participation

or:

safer transport → greater willingness to travel → greater access to education/services

The challenge for transport economics is therefore to capture these broader accessibility effects without exaggerating causality.

Smart transportation creates new opportunities—and new risks

The next generation of transport systems will increasingly use:

automated passenger counting;
smart cards;
mobile applications;
GPS;
real-time vehicle data;
computer vision;
AI-based incident detection;
digital reporting systems.

These technologies can improve gender-responsive planning.

For example, agencies could analyze:

time-of-day travel patterns;
route abandonment;
crowding;
waiting times;
service reliability;
incident locations.

But technology introduces a new responsibility:

Privacy.

Gender-sensitive transportation data can be highly personal.

Agencies should therefore consider:

data minimization;
anonymization;
secure storage;
access controls;
appropriate aggregation;
transparent governance;
protection against misuse.

A smarter transportation system is not automatically a fairer transportation system. AI can detect a pattern. It cannot automatically determine whether the pattern represents discrimination, fear, affordability, cultural norms or another underlying mechanism. Human interpretation remains essential.

Women should not merely be surveyed—they should participate in design

A recurring weakness in infrastructure planning is consultation that happens after the major decisions have already been made. A better approach is participatory planning. Women who actually use a route can identify issues that may be invisible from engineering drawings:

the dark section between two facilities;
the stop where buses routinely fail to pull close to the curb;
the crossing where vehicles do not yield;
the location where passengers are frequently harassed;
the station entrance that becomes isolated after evening hours;
the route that is technically accessible but difficult with children.

UN Women has used safety audits and participatory processes to identify precisely these kinds of problems around transport facilities.

The principle is simple:

Users are not merely passengers. They are sources of engineering evidence.

What does success actually look like?

A gender-responsive transport project should not be declared successful merely because:

kilometres of road were constructed;
buses were purchased;
stations were completed;
passenger capacity increased.

Those are outputs.

The real question is whether outcomes improved.

A more advanced performance framework

Conventional KPI	Expanded KPI
Road capacity	Accessibility to opportunities
Passenger volume	Passenger volume by demographic group
Average speed	Door-to-door travel time
Bus frequency	Frequency during different user travel periods
Station spacing	Effective first/last-mile accessibility
Crash rate	Traffic safety + personal security
Infrastructure completed	Infrastructure usable by diverse users
Ridership	Ridership + previously excluded users
Average travel time	Travel time including waiting/transfers
Complaint count	Complaint rate + resolution rate
Cost per passenger	Cost relative to household affordability
Network coverage	Effective coverage under realistic conditions

This is the transition from infrastructure-centric planning to outcome-centric mobility planning.

The uncomfortable question: if people avoid the system, does the system really serve them?

Imagine a woman has:

a bus stop 600 metres from home;
a functioning bus route;
affordable fares;
sufficient capacity.

Yet she avoids the service after sunset because the walking route is poorly connected and she has experienced harassment at the stop.

Technically:

The system provides access.

Practically:

The system does not provide the same mobility opportunity.

This distinction should fundamentally change how transportation performance is evaluated. The World Bank’s transport work increasingly emphasizes identifying and addressing differentiated mobility barriers rather than assuming that infrastructure provision alone produces equal outcomes.

From “women's transport” to equitable mobility

The strongest transportation strategy is not to construct a special category called “women’s infrastructure.” It is to design transportation around human diversity. That means recognizing that users differ in:

physical ability;
income;
age;
responsibilities;
travel purpose;
risk exposure;
time availability;
access to technology;
vehicle ownership;
social circumstances.

Gender is one important dimension of that diversity.

The goal should therefore be:

Not identical experiences, but equitable access to opportunity.

That distinction is critical. Equality might mean giving everyone the same bus stop. Equity asks whether everyone can realistically use it.

A new transportation-engineering question

For much of its history, transportation engineering has asked:

How many vehicles will use the road?

Then the discipline evolved toward:

How many people can the system move?

Accessibility planning added:

Which destinations can people reach within a reasonable time and cost?

A genuinely inclusive transportation paradigm must go one step further:

Who can use the system, who cannot, and what prevents them from doing so?

That question changes the engineering process. It changes what we measure. It changes what we model. It changes what we design. It changes what we call a successful project.

Conclusion: A road is infrastructure. Mobility is an outcome.

Gender discrimination in transportation does not necessarily appear as a sign saying, “Women are prohibited.” It can be much more subtle.

It can appear as:

a route that does not connect to childcare;
a bus stop that is technically accessible but practically intimidating;
an interchange with poor pedestrian connectivity;
a timetable that ignores non-standard work schedules;
a fare structure that penalizes multiple short trips;
a dataset that records passengers but not suppressed journeys;
a planning process that never asks women why they avoid a particular route;
an infrastructure project that measures construction outputs but not mobility outcomes.

These are not merely social-policy problems. They are transportation problems. The next generation of transportation engineering must therefore move beyond the assumption that equal physical provision automatically produces equal mobility. A modern system should be judged not simply by whether a road was built, whether a bus operates, or whether a station exists. It should be judged by whether people can reach the opportunities they need safely, affordably, reliably and with dignity.

The most important question may no longer be:

“Who uses this road?”

It may be:

“Who cannot use it—and what feature of the transportation system is preventing them?”

That is where gender-responsive transportation becomes more than an inclusion policy. It becomes a more accurate way of understanding transportation itself. Asphalt may have no gender. Mobility does.

References and Further Reading

World Bank — Gender & Transport. Current World Bank evidence and programs addressing gender differences in mobility, transport access, safety, employment and participation in the transport sector.
World Bank — Gender & Transport
World Bank — She Drives Change: Empowering Women in Transport. Reports results from World Bank transport projects and describes the institution’s work to address gender gaps through operations, capacity building, analytics and partnerships.
World Bank — She Drives Change: Empowering Women in Transport
World Bank — Women, Business and the Law 2024. Provides comparative evidence across 190 economies on legal frameworks and implementation gaps affecting women’s economic opportunities, including mobility, safety and childcare.
World Bank — Women, Business and the Law 2024
World Bank — Transport and Accessibility. Provides background on transport access, mobility barriers and the relationship between transport systems and social and economic opportunity.
World Bank — Transport
World Bank — Closing Gender Gaps in Transport. Summarizes evidence showing that transport is not gender-neutral and provides links to World Bank research and resources on gender-responsive transport.
World Bank — Closing Gender Gaps in Transport
Sustainable Mobility for All — Global Roadmap of Action Toward Sustainable Mobility: Gender (2019). Examines gender differences in mobility, access to transport and participation in transport systems within the broader sustainable-mobility framework.
World Bank Document — Toward Sustainable Mobility: Gender
International Transport Forum (ITF/OECD) — Women’s Safety and Security: A Public Transport Priority. Examines women’s safety and security experiences in public transport and discusses the implications for access to employment, education and public services.
ITF/OECD — Women’s Safety and Security
UN Women — Statistical Evidence of Women’s Use and Experience of Public Transport in Kampala and Nairobi. Provides city-level evidence on women’s public-transport use, travel and waiting times, travel patterns and experiences of violence in Kampala and Nairobi.
UN Women Data Hub — Kampala and Nairobi Public Transport Studies
UN Women — Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces for Women and Girls: International Compendium of Practices. Documents practical interventions addressing women’s safety in public spaces, including urban and transport planning, data collection, policy measures and partnerships.
UN Women — Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces
Roy, S., Bailey, A., & van Noorloos, F. (2024). Understanding the barriers affecting women’s mobility in the first- and last-mile stretches in low- and middle-income countries: A systematic review. Journal of Transport Geography, 121, 104036. Reviews 42 studies and identifies barriers involving public transport, non-motorized transport, safety, gender norms, urban form and policy.
ScienceDirect — First- and Last-Mile Mobility Systematic Review

Borker, G. (2024). Understanding the constraints to women’s use of urban public transport in developing countries. World Development, 180, 106589. Reviews evidence concerning affordability, frequency, coverage, comfort, safety, travel patterns and network connectivity affecting women’s use of urban public transport.
ScienceDirect — Constraints to Women’s Urban Public Transport Use

Yuan, Y., Masud, M., Chan, H., Chan, W., & Brubacher, J. R. (2023). Intersectionality and urban mobility: A systematic review on gender differences in active transport uptake. Journal of Transport & Health, 29, 101572. Examines how gender interacts with socioeconomic, cultural and built-environment factors to influence walking and cycling.
ScienceDirect — Intersectionality and Urban Mobility

World Bank — Mainstreaming Gender in Road Transport: Operational Guidance for World Bank Staff. Provides practical guidance for incorporating gender considerations into road-transport projects, including data collection, project planning, implementation, monitoring and participatory approaches.
World Bank — Mainstreaming Gender in Road Transport

World Bank — A Toolkit for Redefining Opportunities for Women in Transport (2025). Provides a structured framework for addressing gender gaps in mobility, employment and entrepreneurship across urban transport, rural and peri-urban roads, rail, aviation, maritime transport and economic corridors.
World Bank — A Toolkit for Redefining Opportunities for Women in Transport

UN Women — Gender-Responsive Low-Carbon Mobility Toolkit (2026). Provides practical tools for integrating gender-responsive planning into safer, more equitable and lower-carbon transport systems, with a focus on Nigeria and vulnerable groups.
UN Women — Gender-Responsive Low-Carbon Mobility Toolkit