When it comes to the lives of women, there is often nothing but silence. The gender data gap isn’t just about silence. These silences, these gaps, have consequences. They impact women’s lives every day.
— Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women (2019)
For too long, transport planning has been built around a single assumption: the user is male, able-bodied, travelling alone from home to work and back. This default shapes the infrastructure we build, the services we fund and the policies we write.
Women experience transport differently: they move with children, perform complex care trips, navigate unsafe streets, and work in a sector that rarely reflects their presence. When this reality goes unmeasured, it goes unaddressed.
The Global Alliance for Feminist Transport, together with the Transport Data Commons, is changing that.
Why does the gender data gap matter?
Despite women representing the majority of public transport users worldwide, transport policies for most countries remain unrelentingly gender-blind. As noted in research across Nairobi, Lagos, and Gauteng, there has been no systematic or comprehensive attempt to roll out gender-sensitive data collection in the public transport sector, and this absence has real consequences for women’s lives every day.
Women and girls experience mobility differently from men in four crucial ways:
- Size matters: physiological differences mean that height, width, and grade affect how women experience public space and infrastructure.
- Mobilities of care and trip chaining: women perform 75% of unpaid care work globally, making multiple short trips to transport children and run errands. Standard surveys miss this entirely.
- Moving with children: navigating transport with a stroller, at a child’s pace, with traffic safety as a constant concern, shapes every route choice.
- Safety: 80% of women globally have experienced harassment in public space (IPSOS, 2021). Fear of harassment directly shapes where and when women travel — and if unreported, it stays invisible to the authorities who could act on it.
Closing this gap means going beyond numbers: it means collecting data that captures why women make the mobility choices they do, which routes they avoid, which hours feel unsafe, how care responsibilities shape every journey. A greater understanding of women’s travel patterns creates a more inclusive picture of how everyone travels, including children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. It also means recognising that women are not a homogeneous group. Age, income, household structure, and geography all shape how women experience transport, and all need to be reflected in the data we collect.
This is the data that makes feminist transport possible. And right now, it is fragmented, inconsistent, and hard to find.
Our partnership with the Transport Data Commons
The Global Alliance for Feminist Transport has joined the Transport Data Commons (TDC), a coalition of over 30 leading organisations working to create a shared, open, and accessible database for the transport sector.
Within the TDC, we are building a dedicated space for gender data in transport: a hub where existing datasets can be discovered, contextualized, and used, and where the gaps become visible too.
This is not just a repository: making gender data findable and open means transport planners, researchers, and advocates everywhere can no longer claim the data doesn’t exist.
We work with our global network to identify who holds relevant data and encourage them to publish it openly on the TDC, turning scattered knowledge into a shared resource.
Do you have data to share?
If your organization collects data on women’s mobility, safety, employment, or roles in transport, we want to hear from you.
Publishing on the TDC means your data reaches a global audience of researchers, policymakers, and advocates. And it means contributing to something bigger: the first open hub for feminist transport data.