Do we actually know how to make cities safer for women?

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💙 Amanda

Fuel the charts

In March 2001, the mayor of Bogotá asked the city's men to do something unusual: Stay home. That night, female police officers patrolled the streets while around 700,000 women enjoyed a night out. On a typical payday Friday, Bogotá saw six to eight homicides. During Bogotá's "Night Without Men," there was only one.

The event was more stunt than solution, but it was aimed at a real, global problem: Women don't feel safe in our cities.

In every country, women worry about walking alone

Share of women who feel safe walking alone at night where they live.

While the severity of the concern varies, at least some women in every country don't feel safe walking alone. Women feel safest in Singapore, thanks to low crime, effective policing and strong public order. (Though if we're looking for a model, a small, wealthy, tightly governed city-state may be a hard one to follow.)

Singapore also stands out for its gender parity — 98% of men and 97% of women said they feel safe. Nearly everywhere else, women feel much less safe than men. In more than 100 countries, the gap between men's and women's percentages is at least 10 percentage points.

Countries with the largest gender gap in perceived street safety

Difference between the percentage of women and men who feel safe walking alone at night.

For many women, worries about safety shape daily life. We give up parks, evenings out and the most direct route home. And we stay hypervigilant:

Stick to well-lit streets. Don't wear headphones. What's the licence plate on your Uber? Park under a street lamp. Share your location. Text me:

Home safe x

Delivered

That's all running through our heads when we're just going from one place to another. Researchers have a name for this invisible labour: Safety work.

Here's what it looks like. Academics showed 571 Brigham Young University students photos of walkways on four college campuses. They were asked to imagine walking through each scene and click on whatever drew their attention. The resulting heat maps show a remarkable difference in how men and women view their surroundings. It's safety work in action.

Where men and women look while walking

Areas that drew attention in photos of campus walkways, by gender.

The study found men's attention was on the path ahead, or on fixed objects like lampposts or garbage cans. Women focused more specifically on areas outside the path, such as bushes, shadows and dark spots.

We aren't paranoid. There's a good reason we do this. Women in the UK, for example, are more likely than men to experience stalking, sexual assault and harassment. But it's also surprisingly hard to know how much danger women actually face in public. Most crime surveys record who the attacker was, not where the attack happened. The data often splits violence into domestic (partners and family) and strangers. It's a rough stand-in for "home" versus "public," but it isn't the same thing.

By that measure, home is far more dangerous. Globally, 60% of women and girls killed intentionally in 2024 were killed by a partner or family member, compared with 11% of male victims. But that doesn't mean the streets are safe for women. The data just can't really tell us.

So, there are challenges with measuring the problem. Surely, I thought, we at least measure the fixes?

I went into this piece hoping to find a Helsinki. You might remember Helsinki as the city that went a full year without a single traffic death, thanks in part to lower speed limits. I wanted a city like that for women's safety — one that tried something bold, measured it, and could point to the results. Instead, I found good intentions and very little data.

France made catcalling and obscene gestures a fineable offence — up to €3,750 for aggravated cases. But as far as I can tell, it has not published any study of whether street harassment has actually gone down. Port Moresby, in Papua New Guinea, introduced women-only buses. Ridership soared — a sign they were useful — but again, no one measured whether harassment fell. Vienna's gender-sensitive planning and Umeå, Sweden's award-winning pedestrian tunnel are held up as models, but I couldn't find any data on whether the cities were made safer for women there, either.

Rio de Janeiro is an exception. There, researchers ran a proper experiment and found that riding in the women-only train car cut physical harassment by half. The catch: riders came to see women in the mixed cars as more open to sexual advances — a stigma that researchers acknowledge "may outweigh the benefits of the safe space."

The most-studied fix of all is much simpler: street lighting. In one study, New York randomly added bright floodlights to 40 public housing developments, and serious nighttime outdoor crime fell by at least 36%. But a review of 21 studies spanning nearly 50 years found that, on average, better lighting mostly cut property crime, not violent crime. And none of this research tells us whether lighting reduces harassment or sexual assault.

So how can we keep our cities safe for women — and for others who face higher risks, such as the LGBTQ+ community, racial minorities and people with disabilities? Helsinki didn't get to zero traffic deaths by guessing. It tracked every crash, tested fixes, and doubled down on what worked. Public safety deserves the same treatment. That means recording incidents of harassment, not just fines. Noting where attacks happen, not just who did it. And checking whether a fix actually fixes something. Start with the data.

A NOT-SHIP PERK!

At the beginning of November, I'll be at the first-ever Visualising Climate conference: Three days of talks and workshops that explore how data visualization can help people understand, and act on, a changing climate.

While there, I'll be your climate-data correspondent! Expect a couple of dispatches loaded with unique data and fresh techniques from the experts reinventing how we talk about the climate crisis.

These special editions are for paying subscribers only. Want in? It's just $9/month or $90/year.

Count me in!

FROM ELSEWHERE

Here's what I found interesting, important or delightful this week:

Cassette Futurism to Soft Colonial Wanderlust. Nostalgic for a vibe you can't name? The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute's Index of Aesthetics catalogues design styles from recent decades, and lets you filter them by when they emerged and when they fell out of fashion.

Pew pew. Type in a URL, then shoot it to bits. Destroy Any Website is exactly what it sounds like. I'm obsessed.

An 'octopus apocalypse'. Europe's seas had a scorching summer too. A Reuters analysis shows record ocean heat, and what it's doing to the fish (and the people who catch them).