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“Right, I’ve been doing some reading (and writing) about young women’s experiences in public space, and it’s made me so angry and upset that I have to share a digest with you all.
Globally, during adolescence, ‘girls’ worlds shrink, while boys’ expand’. One study finds that the map of 14-yo girls’ day-to-day movements is 2/5 the size of that of their 11-yo selves, and only 1/3 the size of 14-yo male peers’ movements.
The shrinking of teenage girls’ access to public space correlates to reduction in girls’ ability to exercise. In Texas, teenage girls do 65% less physical activity than boys. Girls drop out of sport clubs in adolescence at far higher rates than boys. This sets a trend for life.
Numerous factors influence girls’ shrinking access to public space. Some are to do with gender roles in families. A study in rural Australia found that boys tend to be given outdoor chores (mowing the lawn), whereas girls are given indoor ones (washing up etc).
Girls in larger families are less likely to visit parks – probably because parents are less able to chaperone them, and there is a stronger expectation that girls, rather than boys, require chaperoning around public space.
But the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR that deters teenage girls from public places is… the presence of men. Teenage girls in western Australia say openly that ‘they’d use [public] spaces more if boys weren’t around.’
Park features that attract boys and men – such as ‘organized sport settings’ like courts – are repeatedly shown to deter girls. Teenage girls are often seen to gravitate towards playgrounds – the only area of parks consistently populated more by adult women than men.
Girls themselves report 2 main reasons for avoiding spaces dominated by men. The 1st is self-conciousness. The majority of teenage girls interviewed have experience of being taunted by male peers (and male teachers) for their appearance and sporting competence.
But the principal reason is FEAR. Australian teenage girls describe parks as the LEAST safe public space, followed by streets, then public transport. 60% of 13yo girls in Stockholm say they are scared in their own neighbourhood.
In South Africa, girls label over 58% of public spaces ‘unsafe’/ ‘very unsafe’, & areas that boys find ‘extremely safe’ (including schools) girls describe as ‘very unsafe’. Sometimes girls fear is about injury, & girls care more about the maintenance of public spaces like parks.
But mostly girls fear violence and sexual crimes from boys and men. And, across all the studies I’ve read, the teenage girls who were interviewed had direct experience, or had been witnesses to, harassment, stalking, intimidation and assaults from boys and men.
Teenage girls have coping mechanisms for these constraints on their access to public space. Some report trying to behave assertively, to not show fear. In parks, girls are reluctant to engage in exercise & prefer to ‘walk, sit or lay down’ in innocuous places, such as under trees.
In public swimming pools, girls try to make themselves less visible – by swimming in t-shirts, covering themselves with towels until the last moment, or hiding themselves among friends. They try to not draw attention to themselves, by jumping in, messing around or ‘having fun’.
But many deal with these constraints by simply avoiding public space altogether.Many girls explicitly avoid parks & courts. Many retreat to their bedrooms, where girls spend much more time than boys. One girl refers to her room as ‘the only place in the world where she felt safe’
I find this heart-breaking & enraging. I knew from my own experience that women have different responses to public space than men, but I thought I’d become hardened. But reading these studies, in which adolescent girls experience their world & possibilities contracting, is 💔
There are interventions that can help teenage girls to feel more at home in public space, &, by being able to exercise, to be more at home in their bodies. @CCriadoPerez’s wonderful Invisible Women describes interventions made by park planners in Sweden to encourage girls’ access
Better lighting has been shown to attract teenage girls to parks (and, interestingly, to deter teenage boys 🤔), and this describes similar environmental changes to make public space more hospitable to womenSimilarly, there are efforts to improve teenage girls’ experience of school sport: more time to get changed & giving girls better choice of sports (girls report how boys are encouraged to ‘go outside’, while they are confined to ‘dancing studios’).
‘By secondary it’s too late’ – readers on promoting girls’ school sports
Teachers, parents and pupils have their say on what needs to be done to encourage more girls to enjoy physical educationBUT one of the MOST effective interventions is to give girls access to spaces without men. It’s sad that it’s necessary, but allowing girls to participate in single-sex sports is repeatedly shown to increase participation and enjoyment.
Women-only sessions in public spaces like swimming pools allows girls to participate without harassment. Martha Brady shows how facilitating girls’ sports in single-sex spaces can be a way of ‘bringing girls into the public sphere’.
I used to be a bit jokey about the question, ‘women, what would you do if there was a curfew for men?’ But reading this material has made me realise how women are ourselves operating under a curfew. I’m sure many of us feel similarly to teenage girls retreating to our bedrooms.
This material has made me realise how important it is to grasp the extent to which women’s access to PUBLIC space is curtailed – the impact this has on our lives & health & happiness – & to devise ways for girls & women to take up occupation of space they have a right to be in.”
Huh. It seems that even the New York Times acknowledges that something may be up with the way we socialize females in our society. Similar results could be gleaned if say oh, we actually listened when women spoke and took what they said seriously.
“The census data on the labor market show a persistent gap in what white men and women earn and how much they participate in the labor force, though that gap has narrowed over time. But that gender gap varies by states — and it’s that variation that helped the researchers isolate the effects of sexism, by place.
The researchers looked at men and women who were born in the same state and then moved to the same state, like North Carolinians who moved to New York, or Texans who moved to Colorado. They found that the gap in wages and employment between men and women in those groups was bigger for those who were born in states with higher levels of sexism.
They also find that, compared with women around them who were born elsewhere, the women born in more “sexist” places marry and have their first child “at appreciably younger ages.” Another recent paper, in which Ms. Pan was also one of the writers, found a sharp decline in employment for women after their first child is born, and also that women’s attitudes toward gender roles grow more traditional after a birth.
Mr. Charles, Mr. Guryan and Ms. Pan found that the results held even when controlling for age, education and migration patterns, which is to say, Americans historically tend to move to states close to their state of birth as adults, if they move at all.
The research cannot say for certain why those differences persist. The economists say that women appear to internalize social norms when they are young on issues like when to have children, what tasks are appropriate for women in the work force or even how much society values the work of women.
Those traits could, in turn, affect a woman’s willingness to bargain for higher wages. “We know that whatever it is, must be something of a product of where they’re from, and continues to affect them now,” Mr. Charles said. “A notable example here might be the willingness to ask for raises, or the willingness to confront a manager over a raise that was too small. A woman imbued with her value in the marketplace is likely to reject an insufficient raise.”
Those internalized norms appear to have affected a young woman named Nicole, who grew up in Indiana, earned a business degree and a master’s in information systems, and left her home state to build a career. Nicole, who asked that her last name and current employer not be identified, said she has struggled with the assertiveness needed to ask for a raise or a higher starting salary.
By the time she started as a consultant at a large accounting firm, some of her high school friends were married, ready for children, working part time or not at all. Nicole said she was working harder than many of her colleagues and wondering why she earned less than they did. “Sometimes, my male job recruiter friends are like, ‘Why don’t you just ask? When someone offers you a job, they expect you to negotiate,’” she said. “Whereas my friends and I, we’re just happy to have job offers. It didn’t cross my mind that you negotiate.”
Internalizing a culture that does not value women working outside the home, or that makes a woman’s role as a mother a priority, could also discourage women from working longer and less flexible hours. The Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin has found that much of the gender gap in pay comes from differences within occupations, such as law and medicine, where men are rewarded for their disproportionate willingness to work long hours and agree to be on call when they are off duty.”
Women not doing as well in a society regulated by and built for men? Shocking.
The female experience isn’t unknowable, it just seems like a good portion of the population has trained themselves not to listen…
I’m getting fatigued with my #femaleexperience tag. Then I think that if just describing the situation is fatiguing then living it, with no respite, is demonstrably worse. So yeah, off I go, not renewed, but persisting anyways. How society interacts with you depends on which classes you happen to inhabit, because the treatment is not equal. More importantly, this differential spans all experiences in society, moral, legal and familial – egalitarians take note of this feature because the baseline you are experiencing is not necessarily the one others are experiences so things are not ‘fine’ or in need of minor tweaking. Reformation, if not revolution is required to rewrite the base norms of our society to we can say goodbye to the shitty behaviour described below.
https://glow-cats.tumblr.com/post/176602317714/itisthefunpolice-empower-females-nowomanever
More of the female experience of living life in our society. Sounds like fun, no?
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The Arbourist
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