Business Case: Transport

Maersk Group, a Danish shipping and logistics conglomerate, has adopted diversity and inclusion within the workforce as a business practice. While the gender breakdown is quite balanced within white-collar jobs, its management teams remain male dominated. To address this, Maersk has set targets for women in senior and executive leadership, manager roles, and board positions. The company also introduced a diversity dashboard in 2015 to help business units better track progress in meeting targets, as well as identify current and future challenges. Another measure is tailored training programs targeting women entering executive positions. Programs cover management topics and provide networking opportunities.

Recognizing that women both form a sizeable portion of users and have distinct travel patterns, the Transport Ministry in Chile adopted a gender equity policy to make public transportation more fair. Santiago piloted a model that integrates buses, subways, and commuter train fares in a single payment and permits use for more than one trip. This greatly benefits women, as it reduces costs from trip chaining and switching between different modes of transport. The city has designed safer night routes, installed emergency buttons, and deployed mobile apps to increase safety. Buses consider women’s accessibility preferences with wider seats and more space to increase ease of travel with children and elders. The policy also covers measures to increase women’s employment in the sector through training for drivers and gender quotas.

In 2015, the World Bank cancelled a $265M roads project after serious allegations of sexual abuse and violence by contractors. The project to construct a 66km road in Kamwenge in Western Uganda failed to actively consider the safety and wellbeing of community members. In the construction phase, a large influx of temporary workers with little oversight led to many unplanned pregnancies and secondary school dropouts in the surrounding villages. A finding from an external report on the issue named insufficient community consultation as one of the issues during the project.

Technology can be used as a tool to increase women’s safety in public transportation. The ride-hailing app Uber has integrated many features to increase women’s safety as drivers and riders, including an emergency button that alerts police and shares real-time GPS tracking, the ability to share trip details with family or friends, and anonymized contact information when connecting through the app. Safetipin, a mobile application developed in India, offers an option to conduct safety audits using map-based technology and collects information from users and trained auditors to assess perceptions of urban safety in public spaces. Information is collected on nine parameters including lighting, level of crowding or emptiness, availability of public transportation, footpaths, and more. It focuses particularly on last mile connectivity and the surroundings of metro stations, and since its implementation in Delhi has been used in cities such as Bogota, Manilla, and Mexico City.

A road project in Peru gave women the opportunity to express their transport needs in participatory workshops. Largely due to these consultations with women, 3,465 kilometers of non-motorized roads were refurbished, connecting previously isolated communities to markets and services and increasing the economic rate of return of the project. A gender impact assessment conducted found that 77% of women traveled more frequently and 65% felt they traveled more safely. It also showed that women’s participation increased project efficiency, transparency, and quality.