This year's IWD theme: #BreakTheBias

Within local government, biases can hold back both women's participation and progression – for example, LGIU research from 2017 found that in UK councils, women were outnumbered six to one in finance or economic development roles, with those roles being more prestigiously recognised and likely to lead to promotions.

To address this issue, today's featured briefing looks at two initiatives aimed at improving women's confidence and participation in politics, while our policy section also contains a report and a toolkit on overcoming barriers.

Looking outwards at gender equality in wider communities, local government's role cannot be understated. The pandemic has created adverse socioeconomic impacts for women and girls globally, with the World Economic Forum raising the time to reach gender equality by 36 years as a result – to sit at 135 years. Plans for recovery from the pandemic will need to seriously consider how to impactfully support women's recovery, while other urgent issues within local government scope such as poverty, food and housing insecurity, and climate change impacts also disproportionately affect women. 

Localised, targeted interventions can have a huge positive impact in addressing gender inequality across the multitude of issues it overlaps with, but it can be difficult to know what to prioritise and how to achieve the most impact.

This edition of Global Local provides practical examples of gender equality initiatives, ways to improve participation, and information on why more exhaustive policy and organisational culture overhauls, such as gender mainstreaming as in the featured Nordic and Austrian examples, might be the way forward at a time like this.

The need to remove barriers preventing women getting involved in government and specifically local government is well acknowledged across these countries, but this isn’t reflected so much in solutions or progress.

This briefing looks to councils from opposite sides of the world – two successful local government programmes both led by councillors.

An initiative from Meath County Council, Ireland, looks at increasing engaging women in politics – encouraging political participation and influencing perceptions of female politicians. The other, from Georges River Council, Australia, aims to provide young women with tools to support confidence, resilience and leadership in all aspects of their lives.

Vienna’s reputation for gender-sensitive planning precedes it, having been one of the first cities to actively look to consider social gender roles across multiple areas of policy and urban planning – issues that most people wouldn’t associate with any gendered difference. This process is called ‘gender mainstreaming’, and for Vienna, it kicked off in the 1990s after city planners organised a photography exhibit depicting women’s everyday lives and travel patterns around the city. The photos drew attention from politicians and the public to women’s concerns over safety and travel.

In the 1990s, Vienna began to identify the gaps in data relating to how gender might affect public space usage, including studying how different groups were using space and transport differently. For example, officials noticed that after age 9, girls had almost entirely disappeared from parks. Rather than assuming that girls were not interested in sport, detailed surveys discovered that it was the presence of only one large space in parks that was driving them out – a space dominated by boys playing football, leaving the girls feeling like they couldn’t compete for space.

When paths were used to break up the space, and alternative activities added, park usage by girls shot up to almost parity with boys. Shifting away from prescriptive problem solving and towards exploring the lived experience of the people in the area – especially marginalised groups – was key for achieving inclusivity.

Another data gap closed after Viennese officials asked citizens to complete a questionnaire on how they used public transport. Most of the men finished the questionnaire almost immediately, while women “couldn’t stop writing”. While men reported travelling twice a day to commute to and from work, women used a greater variety of transport methods and made long strings of trips in a web centred around home – combining paid work, care work, shopping and other errands. Public transport and fare structures at the time were not geared toward this style of travel, so women’s time, money, and productivity suffered.

This is a familiar problem across the world, where the disproportionate time costs of care and running errands (disproportionately falling on women) led to women’s reduced participation in the labour market, be that working part-time or turning down better-paid work due to infeasible commute lengths – perpetuating gendered income inequality.

Crucially, this realised difference was deemed important, resulting in action to re-evaluate the city’s long-term approach to urban planning and shifting the focus to improving accessibility, safety and ease of movement.

So, how was transport inequality addressed?