Make our public spaces safe for women pedestrians

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TODAY is International Women’s Day. March 8 serves as a stark reminder that much still needs to be done to eliminate gender inequality, discrimination and violence against women in our country. This year’s theme is #PressforProgress and I would like to highlight a subtle form of gender inequality that exists. It is known as “activity inequality”.

Activity inequality occurs when a country has a wide gap between those who walk a lot and those who walk very little. A 2017 Stanford study (http://activityinequality.stanford.edu/) that analysed the smartphone data of 717,527 people over 68 million days found that women walked disproportionately fewer steps each day than men in most countries. This occurrence is also known as the “gender step gap”, which is the difference between the number of steps taken by men and women.