Women, Work and Transport: Volume 16

This chapter introduces the scope and contents of Women, Work and Transport. The situation concerning the extent of women’s participation in the transport workforce worldwide is detailed and the challenges facing women transport workers in different world regions and transport modes is highlighted. The chapter describes the structure, contents and key contributions of each of the 21 chapters that are presented in this volume and signposts readers to key material. Although the chapter necessarily highlights some of the many challenges women face when working in highly masculine cultures, this wide-ranging international collection of evidence of the experiences of women transport professionals in both the Global North and Global South also provides numerous suggestions for how employers, governments and trade unions can address, and ultimately overcome, gender segregation in transport. The chapters acknowledge the dramatic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the transport sector, while also pointing to some of the opportunities provided by new greener forms of transport and automation, as well as noting the risks for women workers.

More is known about women travelling on public transport than about women working in public transport. This chapter addresses the latter and examines the barriers and challenges both for women as employees and for employers (usually men) employing women. A historical overview of women’s work in transport provides the context for considering more contemporary literature and data on the employment of women in the bus mode as the mode most pervasive in public transport. Primary evidence from two vignettes from the bus industry in New South Wales, Australia, which draw on first-hand experience to highlight some of the barriers and challenges for increasing women’s participation in public transport. Both vignettes reveal the changes that the industry has faced, as well as its ongoing challenges and the benefits of increasing women’s participation in transport work. The experiences from the vignettes highlight the numerous actors involved in making the changes to increase women’s participation – employers, regulators, governments, trade unions and workers themselves. The chapter discussion provides some tentative conclusions for policy and highlights areas for further research.

The gender specific issues that arise out of transport infrastructures, such as more complex travel patterns and safety and security concerns for women in transport, highlight more than ever the need for a better gender perspective in the design, development and management of transport systems. This however is hard to achieve when only 22 per cent of transport employees in the European Union are female. According to the International Transport Forum, women are less represented in senior level positions in the sector. Furthermore, with declining numbers in employment in the sector, the risks of discounting some of these gender concerns in decision-making becomes even more pressing. This chapter looks at current trends and investigates the opportunities and challenges that the sector is facing to attract, retain and train women in transport. Focussing on cases of EU island states, this research will look at women and work within the public transport sector and, through interviews with management, will investigate concerns about current trends as well as the future of work in transport. The chapter also discusses the future of transport employment, and raises some questions with regard to the fast approaching decarbonisation of transport, with increased focus on green skills and green jobs, but also with the forthcoming technological disruption envisaged through automation and Mobility as a Service.

The public transport sector is known for high levels of violence, but women are particularly at risk of gender-based violence, including sexual harassment, from both passengers and fellow workers. Furthermore, women transport users face high rates of sexual harassment. This chapter provides evidence of the extent of gender-based violence and harassment in public transport, arguing that attention, though minimal, has been paid to the experiences of female passengers, but overlooks women workers’ experiences of gender-based violence. The chapter discusses the role of key actors in dealing with and preventing gender-based violence for both passengers and women workers. It draws on evidence from Kenya, collected as part of research for the International Transport Workers Federation on the future of work for women in public transport, and other published sources. It argues that the state (national and local), employers, trade unions and civil society actors all have a key role to play in preventing sexual harassment and gender-based violence at work, but need to do more, particularly through adopting and publicising a zero-tolerance approach to gender-based violence. It also highlights the importance of collaboration among key stakeholders for effective intervention and enforcement.

The International Labour Organisation Convention 190 on Violence and Harassment in the World of Work, with an accompanying Recommendation, came into force in June 2021. This represents a potentially powerful new framework for action on tackling and preventing violence and harassment at work that recognises the interrelated effects of gender-based violence and harassment, gender stereotypes and unequal gender power relations, which underpin occupational gender segregation. The transport sector was particularly mentioned in the Convention as an area where change is needed. The chapter briefly considers the Convention’s potential to tackle gender-based violence in the transport sector and how global trade unions are using this opportunity.

Male identity and motor-mobility are deeply intertwined across much of the globe but nowhere is this relationship more strongly in evidence than in Africa. On the African continent, road transport work has always appeared, in essence, to be a masculinist domain: it is almost always men who are seen driving commercial vehicles, regulating loading activities in the lorry and bus parks (and now the motorcycle stages), undertaking roadside repairs, vulcanising tyres, and even serving fuel. This does not mean that women are entirely absent from the sector, but their place is commonly peripheral – constrained at least in part by hegemonic norms of femininity that shape women’s self-understandings. They typically supply cooked food, alcohol and sex to male road workers, or take on back-breaking work in the lowliest – and lowest paid – of porterage roles, head-loading goods along the road, carrying materials when assisting men making and mending roads, or loading vehicles. From time to time, women have aspired to infiltrate more lucrative areas of the sector, especially through ownership of commercial vehicles, but their closer engagement with the oily nuts and bolts of the road business remains rare.

This chapter draws on a wide range of published and grey literature and some personal ethnographic research from a diversity of African countries and contexts to examine women’s efforts at engagement in the sector. The discussion spans women’s employment in road transport services (porterage, ticket-selling, taxis, buses, Bus Rapid Transit [BRT] and commercial trucks) and the road construction that supports transport service operations (engineering, planning, contracting, and labouring). The authors pay particular attention to the factors that so often continue to impede women’s progress in these arenas. The concluding section first references COVID-19 and its detrimental impacts on women transport workers’ jobs, then considers the potential for overcoming current barriers and promoting a more central space for women in transport operations, a development that could provide significant benefits across the sector.

Freight and logistics are central to everyday life. These sectors depend on a variety of workers, and the types of work have changed rapidly with shifts towards e-commerce and changes to urban logistics. Yet a particular form of masculinity dominates imaginaries of the sector, especially freight transport. Such imaginaries rest on ideas of freight drivers requiring (physical) strength, toughness, flexibility, mobility and driving competencies, as well as being unencumbered by caring responsibilities. In the UK, and elsewhere, the freight sector, and particularly driving-related freight jobs, are heavily reliant on male workers. The freight driver shortage crisis in the UK has been referred to as a ‘ticking timebomb’, emerging from a reliance on white male workers, the majority of whom are over the age of 50. A ‘diversifying’ agenda has been the primary response to this crisis, which has largely focussed on increasing the number of female drivers. At the same time, however, little has been done to address issues associated with pay and conditions for freight workers. In this chapter, the authors examine gendered freight work across three themes: changing mobilities of work, ‘flexibilisation’ of freight working practice and automation of freight vehicles.

Walking and cycling have a long history in work itself and people travelling to and from work. Who walks and cycles, how they perform those journeys, the precise role that journey plays in the course of the working day and how it is valued are informed by social constructions of gender. Gendering of mobility has a long history and, in many countries, women continue to face challenges when they walk and they continue to be discouraged in more or less explicit ways from cycling. This exploratory chapter draws together literature on occupations, paid and unpaid, that involve walking and cycling as an integral part of collecting and delivering people and things. A wide variety of services are discussed in the literature but the research on the mode of travel for individual services – like food delivery, waste picking, rural health work, ‘mobility of care’ – is limited and there is little attention to gender. Further, any comparative studies tend to be between cities with similar economic status or cultural heritage. This chapter includes research from high, medium and low income countries not to universalise experiences but to identify common themes, and suggest avenues for further research. We argue the inequitable distribution of transport resources, the gendering of bicycling related skills and the masculinisation of public space are pervasive. However, they are also being challenged by women supporting each other, partners supporting wives and communities making opportunities available to all members.

This chapter explores women leaders’ outward appearance in the male-dominated world of rail, through the lenses of postfeminism and neoliberalism. Drawing on 31 interviews with women leaders in rail, it maps how a postfeminist logic is evident in women leaders’ narratives of aesthetic femininity. Aesthetic femininity refers to women leaders’ outward appearance which they describe as feminine. The research participants justify their feminine ‘work style’ through postfeminist themes of individual choice, natural sex differences, irony, personal initiative, skill and empowerment. The findings also show a patterning of justification around aesthetic femininity that fits a neoliberal self-governance as enterprise, self-flexibility and self-confidence. It is argued that whilst these iterations of aesthetic femininity are rooted in postfeminist and neoliberal contexts, they have consequences for sustaining gendered inequalities and traditional feminine norms in the highly masculinised culture of rail. Women’s narratives, whereby gender inequalities are acknowledged then subsumed into individualised agency through dress and appearance, do little to challenge the gendered culture in this sector.

The issue of women’s under-representation in male-dominated occupations has been a topic of research for the last few decades. The extant literature has identified gender differences and social and structural discrimination based on a theoretical lens and sensitising concepts around which career barriers were experienced by women within a developed nation’s context (Eaton et al., 2020; French & Strachan, 2009; Hernandez & Ritchie, 2015; Miner et al., 2018). While there has been research on women in transport in developed countries, there has been little research on women employees’ career experiences within Indian Railways. To address this gap, this chapter explores the career barriers of women employed in male-dominated occupations within Indian Railways, in relation to gendered cultural norms. In-depth semi-structured interviews have been undertaken to understand the lived experiences of women employees. Thematic analysis was used for data analysis. The findings highlight the interplay of barriers such as gender roles, limited empowerment and occupational segregation, working conditions, lack of role models and mentors, backlash by men, queen-bee behaviour, beta career priorities and restricted informal networks that collectively restrict women in achieving senior level positions in such occupations.

The focus of this chapter is intersectional bullying and harassment in the rail sector in Britain, where the workforce is male-dominated, gender-segregated and ethnically diverse. There have been significant gender and race equality issues in the sector that have resulted in a number of high profile legal cases. The authors draw on data from a trade union survey of members (Transport and Salaried Staffs Association) focussing on their experiences achieving equality at work. The survey received 1,054 useable responses. The authors have used both additive and multiplicative data analysis methods to capture the methodological debates concerning intersectional analysis. The analyses provided some varied responses, depending on the methods used, but an enduring factor was that older, ethnic minority women were the group who were most likely to feel that they had suffered bullying and harassment. The authors discuss these findings in relation to the limited legal interventions for intersectional bullying and harassment. The authors argue that employers and trade unions must develop proactive institutional responses to mitigate its damaging consequences.

Only 5 per cent of commercial airline pilots worldwide are women and women who enter the profession may experience negative attitudes and differential treatment on account of their gender. Although a growing body of research has focussed on the experiences of women pilots once they are hired, there is a need to examine women’s experiences during their initial (ab initio) training when their personal and professional identities are being developed and contested. Drawing on empirical fieldwork of the experiences of both women and men ab initio pilots undergoing training at two UK-based Flight Schools, this chapter reveals that women cadets not only perceive elements of their professional identities differently from men but that they actively adopt a range of strategies to negotiate potential conflicts between their developing personal and professional identities. The chapter makes a theoretical and empirical contribution to existing studies of gender-dominated professions and offers recommendations to Flight Training Schools and airlines who are seeking to encourage more women to enter the airline pilot profession.

The alta mentoring platform, launched within the aviation and aerospace industry in 2019, is the outcome of a joint knowledge exchange project between academics and industry. It was designed and launched to meet the mentoring needs of women in this male dominated industry, who otherwise had no, or very little, mentoring support. The aim of alta was to create an on-line mentoring platform that was based upon the mentoring support that women identified as being important and that would address their under-representation and the lack of support for career progression. The chapter draws upon a body of literature focussing upon mentoring, specifically its meanings (see Dashper, 2018), benefits (see Phillips et al., 2016) and barriers (see Eby et al., 2010); as well as gender specific mentoring (see Johns & McNamara, 2014). The authors adopt a feminist relational mentoring framework (Ragins, 2016), that views mentoring as a two-way process where mentors and mentees learn from each other. The project was under-pinned by six months of research across the industry (a survey, interviews and focus groups with professional women and employers) to ascertain the need for the mentoring platform. This chapter is based upon four focus groups held with women across the industry, in both technical and middle/senior managerial roles, to ascertain their experiences of mentoring and their perceived and experienced benefits and barriers to mentoring. The focus groups were also utilised to find out specifically what women wanted from the alta mentoring platform and their views on its women-only focus.

The implications arising from the underrepresentation of women and inequality of female participation in leadership and senior management positions continues to challenge many sectors of the economy and transportation, including commercial aviation. Although concerted efforts have been made to introduce initiatives encouraging women into senior leadership roles, change is slow and women remain underrepresented on Senior Management Teams (SMTs) and the Executive Committees of commercial airlines and airports. Globally, and prior to the COVID pandemic, only 3 per cent of airline CEOs were women whilst women held 8 per cent of airline CFO posts and 3 per cent of COO posts (Silk, 2019).

Air transport’s apparent inability to recruit and retain women in top leadership positions poses a serious challenge to the sector and the global economy as a whole. This chapter argues that lack of gender diversity will inevitably hinder the expansion of the sector and pose a significant challenge by failing to capitalise on the skill set of women. The aim of this chapter is to examine women’s representation and progression within the UK aviation sector with a particular focus on airports.

In the aviation sector adversity faced by female pilots stemming from stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination are well documented. Such adversity in the workplace can cause occupational stress, which may be greater for female pilots, and this influences individual resiliency, impacting job performance and wellbeing. Resilience may be a mitigating factor for coping with occupational stress and individual resilience can be factored into an organisation’s resilience as a whole. When organisations face challenges, there is a need for resilience in order to survive and adapt during disruption and adversity. Resilience with respect to employee and workplace contexts includes both personal resources among the employees as well as workplace resources that are connected to the workplace and organisational environment. As resilience continues to emerge as part of a human capital management strategy, the need to understand the role of the workplace is magnified. For aviation, understanding resilience can potentially inform organisational interventions to address the known occupational stressors and workplace adversity to increase employee performance and well-being. The role of workplace adversity and perceptions of workplace resource availability including supportive environments are discussed in relation to how they influence employee resilience specifically in the aviation industry. The aim of this chapter is to define resilience specific to employee and workplace contexts, introduce personal and workplace resources to influence employee resilience, and discuss the role of occupational stressors specifically for women in male-dominated career fields such as aviation.

Awareness of gender perspectives in the maritime sector has been growing in recent years. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) adopted the World Maritime Day 2019 theme of ‘empowering women in the maritime community’, inspiring maritime stakeholders to respond to this global initiative. The maritime sector has been traditionally characterised as male-dominated and women represented only 1.28 per cent of the total seafaring population in 2021. The majority of women seafarers work in catering and hotel sections on cruise ships and ferries, where women are stereotypically considered to be more suited than working in technical and operational sections on board ships. Despite the political and legal will to promote women in the maritime sector, this figure has not changed over the last 30 years. This chapter provides an overview of gender ratios in various maritime jobs which are based at sea, in ports, and on shore. The chapter also offers an account of how various barriers impede the attraction, recruitment and retention, and leadership of women in the maritime sector. Women working in the maritime sector may face sexual harassment and discrimination at training as well as in the workplace. Some shipping companies are hesitant to employ women as they perceive women as risk factors in a man’s world. In addition to cultural and legal barriers, there are structural barriers that de-value women as human capital through unequal investment and training opportunities. The chapter discusses the future of the maritime sector, in relation to automation, smart and green shipping, digitalisation and energy efficiency, and the challenges and opportunities this presents for women. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected the sector and its workers. In order to build a transformative and resilient maritime industry, gender equality is the key to driving success in this transition and it is necessary to mainstream gender in every step of designing and implementing new processes for the future maritime sector.

The cargo shipping industry constitutes a gendered (male) occupation par excellence with a traditionally strong masculine occupational culture. Another prominent feature of this global industry is its ethnically segmented labour market. The ‘racial’ divide of the workforce intersects with gender and other axes of difference. Drawing on the author’s own ethnographic data as well as on a comprehensive review of existing research on the field, the chapter gives an overview of the issues faced by women working in the sector as well as their ways of coping with those issues. Gendered workplace interactions at sea often refer to a misogynistic discourse deeply rooted in the traditionally masculine culture of the industry, attempting to symbolically exclude women from the occupational group. Drawing on Kate Manne’s theory of the ‘logic of misogyny’, the author interprets those interactional practices as attempts by men to defend the gendered identity of the occupational group against the intrusion of women.

Although female participation in the labour market has increased significantly over the last 50 years, transport remains a male dominated sector and maritime transport in particular appears to lag behind other modes. It is important to recognise that maritime careers struggle to recruit more generally. This chapter considers the gender gap in the maritime industry and asks what would make the maritime industry more attractive to women. It explores the literature through the lenses of career-decision, career decidedness and career self-efficacy in order to present a conceptual model to explain the persistent gap and consider what could be done to address it. Career choices, development and performance are affected by contextual variables, both personal and environmental, which can promote or hinder career development outcomes. In maritime transport, career perception, workplace culture, social capital and development opportunities still play a major part in the decision-making process and deter women from engaging with the maritime profession. This chapter proposes four interventions to effect much-needed change.

The chapter assesses the state of research and gender-specific data in maritime shipping and ports. This is crucial for implementing and promoting Sustainable Development Goal 5 ‘Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’ in the sector under study. Moreover, the present chapter examines whether progress has been made regarding the availability of gender-related data and research in the port sector.

An extensive review of the literature covering gender-related research in the shipping and port sectors going back to the pre-1990 period has been carried out. Next, data from the Port Performance Scorecard established under the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) TrainForTrade (TfT) Port Management Programme (PMP) is analysed, covering the 2015–2020 period. Last, this research is complemented by the results of a survey conducted in 2021 across UNCTAD’s TfT port network.

The literature review identified the main gender dimensions affecting maritime shipping and ports, namely health, empowerment, economic, and education. These results were completed by insights generated by the analysis of gender-related data obtained through selected member ports of the UNCTAD TfT PMP. Overall, the data provided information about the state of play and the existing data gaps and limitations relating to mainstreaming the gender dimension in maritime shipping and ports. It confirmed that traditional stereotypes about the type of job functions that can be fulfilled by women remain prevalent in these two sectors. In this context, the chapter concludes that improving data availability and accessibility in maritime shipping and ports is imperative to advance research and evidence-based policymaking that promote gender equality in maritime transport. Closing the data gap and refining data on gender across the maritime supply chain sector is therefore key. As available data are insufficiently accessible and highly aggregated and which in turn limits the analytical scope, the present chapter recommends that a framework for a Maritime Shipping and Port Gender Equality and Diversity Index be established while leveraging existing data and efforts, including by UNCTAD.

Despite women comprising around 50 per cent of the UK population and workforce, they only account for 20 per cent of workers in the transport sector. This chapter focusses on the key issues for women working in transport and explores how government policy and industry initiatives can support improving gender balance within the transport industry workforce. The chapter presents the findings of recent research examining experiences of women working in transport, and perceptions of men – which seeks to better understand culture, career opportunities, and (perceived) gender issues within the transport sector. It also presents case studies of successful initiatives that have been implemented to address gender (im)balance in transport organisations. Drawing on these findings, the chapter provides evidence-based recommendations, that have been presented to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Women in Transport in the UK and evaluates the role of government in enacting meaningful change to improve gender balance in the transport industry.

This chapter begins by introducing trade unions: their purpose in representing members, different perspectives on the role and impact of trade unions and the opposition they face within the workplace. The chapter proceeds to discuss the role of, and particular challenges faced by, trade unions in the civil aviation industry. There follows a discussion of the role of women in civil aviation and both the crucial role played by women within trade unions and the role of trade unions in representing the interests of women. The chapter closes with a discussion of the role women might play in the revitalisation of the labour movement within the civil aviation industry.

Women transport workers are a proud part of the workforce, central to the global economy linking supply chains and keeping the world moving. But the transport industry is highly gendered. Women transport workers are overrepresented in precarious informal work and non-standard forms of employment without social protections, they are underrepresented in leadership and decision-making, and are facing endemic gender-based violence, and sanitation indignity. Women’s jobs in transport are more likely to be vulnerable to the impacts of automation and digitalisation. Responses to the challenges arising from the COVID-19 crisis have the potential to exacerbate existing inequalities.

This chapter argues that it is imperative that the transport industry – including employers, governments, investors, and unions – put into action a gender-responsive approach to ensure that inequalities are not reproduced, perpetuated or intensified, and that there is a ‘gender equal new normal’. Strengthening women’s employment in transport needs to address more than just recruitment, and failure to also address the reality of gender-based violence and other aspects related to decent work risks undermining any interventions to increase women in transport. The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) continues to prioritise work to improve the status and working lives of women in transport. Through policy and innovative action programmes – including union organising, campaigning, collective bargaining, developing women’s activism and leadership, and building strategic alliances – the chapter shows how the ITF is supporting women transport workers, through their trade unions, to address their most significant industrial and workplace issues, to shape, and lead the struggle for equality.