Racing Turtles

Most women who use a gym will have experienced that moment of psyching herself up to walk into the free weights area, knowing that many of the men who dominate the space will regard her on a range from nuisance to freak. And yes, you can technically just walk in, but there’s that extra mental hurdle to clear that most men simply don’t face, and it takes a particular kind of self-confidence not to be bothered by it at all. Some days, you just won’t feel like it. It’s the same story in the outdoor gym in my local park; if it’s full of men, I often give it a miss, not relishing the inevitable stares and all too clear sense that I don’t belong.

The inevitable reaction from some quarters to such complaints is to tell women to stop being delicate flowers – or for feminists to stop painting women as delicate flowers. And of course some women aren’t bothered by the leering and macho posturing. But women who do avoid these spaces are not being irrational, because there are plenty of accounts of hostility from men when women venture into supposedly gender-neutral shared exercise spaces. Like transit environments, then, gyms are often a classic example of a male-biased public space masquerading as equal access.

The good news is that this kind of male bias can be designed out and some of the data collection has already been done. In the mid-1990s, research by local officials in Vienna found that from the age of ten, girls’ presence in parks and public playgrounds ‘decreases significantly’. But rather than simply shrugging their shoulders and deciding that the girls just needed to toughen up, city officials wondered if there was something wrong with the design of parks. And so they planned some pilot projects, and they started to collect data. 

What they found was revealing. It turned out that single large open spaces were the problem, because these forced girls to compete with the boys for space. And girls didn’t have the confidence to compete with the boys (that’s social conditioning for you) so they tended to just let the boys have the space. But when they subdivided the parks into smaller areas, the female drop-off was reversed. They also addressed the parks’ sports facilities. Originally these spaces were encased by wire fencing on all sides, with only a single entrance area – around which groups of boys would congregate. And the girls, unwilling to run the gauntlet, simply weren’t going in. Enter, stage right, Vienna’s very own Leslie Knope, Claudia Prinz-Brandenburg, with a simple proposal: more and wider entrances. And like the grassy spaces, they also subdivided the sports courts. Formal sports like basketball were still provided for, but there was also now space for more informal activities – which girls are more likely to engage in. These were all subtle changes – but they worked. A year later, not only were there more girls in the park, the number of ‘informal activities’ had increased. And now all new parks in Vienna are designed along the same lines.

The city of Malmö, Sweden, discovered a similar male bias in the way they’d traditionally been planning ‘youth’ urban regeneration. The usual procedure was to create spaces for skating, climbing and painting grafitti. The trouble was, it wasn’t the ‘youth’ as a whole who were participating in these activities. It was almost exclusively the boys, with girls making up only 10-20% of those who used the city’s youth-directed leisure spaces and facilities. And again, rather than shrugging their shoulders and thinking there was something wrong with the girls for not wanting to use such spaces, officials turned instead to data collection.

In 2010, before they began work on their next regeneration project (converting a car park to a leisure area) city officials asked the girls what they wanted. The resulting area is well lit and, like the Viennese parks, split into a range of different-sized spaces on different levels. Since then, Christian Resebo, the official from Malmö’s traffic department who was involved in the project, tells me, ‘Two more spaces have been developed with the intention of specifically targeting girls and younger women.’