Women feel 10 per cent more unsafe than men in public transport across the world
New Delhi : Researchers have analysed that on an average women feel 10 per cent more unsafe than men while travelling in public transport across the world. This changes as per the mode of public transport.
It has been found that women in Europe felt 12% more unsafe than men while they boarded on public transport, while in South America the percentage difference of feeling safe was 9%.
The findings from the study have been published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A. The study was conducted by Imperial College London on data from 2009 to 2018. For the findings, the researchers looked at a third of a million passenger responses to Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSSs) from 28 cities across four continents.
"Feeling unsafe can lead to social, professional, economic, and health problems for those affected," said study lead author Laila Ait Bihi Ouali from Imperial College London in the UK.
“In this case, women who feel unsafe on public transport might turn down shift work at certain times of day, or avoid social or work events that require travelling a certain route,” Ouali added.
As mentioned in the study, public transport operators send an online survey form to a set of customers and ask them to rate the service as per the level of satisfaction.
Every year, the surveys ask passengers their level of agreement with various statements about availability, time, information, comfort, security, customer care, accessibility, environment, and overall satisfaction.
The response options are usually: agree strongly; agree; neither agree nor disagree; disagree, or disagree strongly. To carry out the study, the researchers looked at 327,403 completed responses to CSSs from 2009 to 2018.
They then compared the scores between the men and women to prepare a statistical result over feeling safe in public transport.
The researchers found that around half of the women surveyed felt safe on urban public transport (45 per cent felt safe in metro trains and stations; 55 per cent felt safe in buses), but that women were ten per cent more likely than men to report feeling unsafe in metro trains and stations, and six per cent more likely than men to feel unsafe in buses.
