Benefits and Unintended Consequences of Gender Segregation in Public Transportation: Evidence from Mexico City’s Subway System

Social Norms as a Barrier to Women’s Employment in Developing Countries

“…Through its Viajemos Seguras (Women Traveling Safely) program, Mexico City reserves the first three cars of the subway for women before 10 o'clock in the morning and after 2 o'clock in the afternoon. Aguilar et al (2017) surveyed over 3000 women to measure self-reported harassment of women riding the subway. By making comparisons around when the women-only-cars hours start and end each day, they find that the program reduces harassment.…”

Demand for Safe Spaces: Avoiding Harassment and Complying with Norms

“…In response to the increased public awareness of the high prevalence of sexual harassment in the public space, the creation of women-reserved "safe spaces" has surged. 1 While these reserved spaces may provide an avenue for avoiding harassment (Aguilar et al, 2018), bystanders may implicitly view women outside the reserved space as provoking harassment and assign the responsibility for harassment to the victim. By playing into latent prejudice, these reservation policies may thus induce a stigma against women in the public, non-reserved space, thus reinforcing those same norms that are deleterious to women's safety in the first place (e.g., "women should not overstep their boundaries"; "to be safe, a woman should stick to her reserved space").…”

“…Closest in spirit to our methodology are studies that employ a revealed preference approach to quantify the economic cost of crime through residential sorting, housing prices, and school choice (Cullen & Levitt, 1999;Gibbons, 2004;Linden & Rockoff, 2008;Besley & Mueller, 2012;Borker, 2018). By generating individual variation in opportunity cost and random assignment to different spaces on the public transit, we contribute to a strand of the literature that, so far, has relied on stated preferences to establish the cost of specific criminal incidents (Cohen et al, 2004;Aguilar et al, 2018). Third, we move beyond evaluating partial equilibrium effects of "safe space" policies and explore general equilibrium effects through the emergence of a stigma with a dedicated IAT.…”

Safety First: Perceived Risk of Street Harassment and Educational Choices of Women

“…I provide what to my knowledge is the first evidence of the effect that daily harassment has on a durable human capital investment such as higher education. I also estimate the first revealed preference estimates of travel safety in terms of travel costs and travel time, augmenting estimates based on women-only public transportation (Aguilar, Gutierrez andSoto Villagran 2019, Kondylis et al 2020).…”