The city is an organized memory, and in history, women are the forgotten. - Hannah Ahrendt
Dear FemWealth Friends,
In today's issue, we are looking into designing and building a gender-equitable world, both in real life and online. With Covid restrictions slowly being lifted, we regain some of the freedom to move through the cities and across countries and meet people in public spaces.
As we imagine a new, hybrid world, I invite you to reflect on whether the physical and virtual spaces you "inhabit" feel safe, comfortable, and welcoming. Does your neighborhood accommodate the needs of children, women, and men of all ages - including those who have disabilities? Are your online interactions secure, engaging, and respectful?
In the last century, Western cities have been built mainly by men architects, around men's mobility habits - driving from home to an office and back. Pedestrians and public transit commuters (primarily women) and cyclists, and other micro-mobility participants came second to city planners' minds. Narrow sidewalks, poor lighting during the night, high criminality rates, absence of elevators in airports and train stations (handy if you push a pram or are in a wheelchair), and not enough public toilets are signs a city is not very welcoming.
More than 55% of the world's population now live in urban areas. Particularly in the Global South, megacities are rising. In many countries, women have fewer rights than men and are vulnerable to violence, poverty, and climate change.
The online world has its gender data gaps and biases. From limited access to the internet and algorithmic data biases to online sexual harassment and privacy breaches, women (particularly non-white women) face a lot of hostility online.
How do we create human-centered designs that work for women and men of all ages and socio-cultural contexts? One of the answers is undoubtedly having more women decision-makers and shapers involved in the designing and building of these important - physical and virtual - dimensions of our world.
Meet and get inspiration from some of the women who pave the way towards a gender-equitable world:
Yasmeen Lari, Architect, Humanitarian and Heritage Conservationist, Founder of The Heritage Foundation, Barefoot Social Architecture and Barefoot Incubator for Social Good and Environmental Sustainability
The next generation of women needs to know that there are no easy solutions. There is bound to be resistance against gender equality for perhaps many decades to come. Those women who have crossed the barrier, or broken the glass ceiling, carry the responsibility to try to open doors for others, so that in time even conservative societies become supportive of women in fulfilling their potential.
The first woman architect of Pakistan, Yasmeen Lari, is a humanitarian and barefoot social architecture pioneer. A graduate of the Oxford School of Architecture in the UK, she established Lari Associates, Architects, Urban Designers in 1964. She worked on various projects, from mud buildings, low-income housing, and improvements in spontaneous settlements to state-of-the-art "monuments of corporate excess." During her long career, she designed iconic projects and becoming a widely acclaimed Starchitect. She retired in 2000 to focus on writing and heritage conservation. She also founded The Heritage Foundation together with her husband to preserve Pakistan's cultural heritage.
In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake that hit northern Pakistan in 2005, Lari became involved in the rebuilding efforts. She worked with the dispossessed families and trained local people to use available materials.
Lari continued to support reconstruction projects after a series of natural disasters and conflicts affected her country. Lari and the Heritage Foundation have also developed programs to empower the local communities, training barefoot entrepreneurs.
An advocate for zero carbon and carbon-negative movements in urban design, she only uses sustainable materials such as earth, lime, and bamboo. Her current practice integrates three main strands:
Learning from tradition and heritage
Community engagement for co-building
Co-creation and reliance on barefoot approaches
Working in a conservative country (Pakistan is second last in the gender equality rankings), Lari involved women in designing amenities that improve their lifestyles and restore their dignity. One such project is the elevated chulah stove, built by women, that became a socializing place for families.
Lari has been awarded the Jane Drew Prize 2020 for her contribution to raising the profile of women in architecture and design.
🎥 Barefoot Social Architecture: Towards a Sustainable Urban Future | Yasmeen Lari
📖 Yasmeen Lari: letter to a young architect
📖 The barefoot architect: 'I was a starchitect for 36 years. Now I'm atoning'
📖 “Architects Have To Be Really Sensitive About Their Own Traditions"
📖 ‘In architectural practice you are so isolated from the reality of the country’: Yasmeen Lari and self-sustaining architecture
Eva Kail, Gender Planning Expert, City of Vienna
The argument is, you get a fairer society. As a public administration, to offer good service for the people – to have better quality of life – you have to take care of gender equality.
Eva Kail is one of the leading experts for gender mainstreaming in urbanism and architecture in Europe. She has worked for the City of Vienna since 1986, where she was the first head of Vienna's Women's Office - the Frauenburo (1991 - 1998). In addition, Kail has built up the Co-Ordination Office for Planning a Construction geared to the Requirement of Daily Life and the Specific Needs of Women between 1998 and 2009. Since 2010 she has worked as the Gender Expert in the Executive Group for Construction and Technology. During her decades-long career, she has coordinated more than 60 pilot projects in Housing, Mobility, Public Space, Urban Development, and Social Infrastructure.
Starting in the 1990s, together with her team and collaborators, Kail set up design processes to create women-friendly spaces. Involving young girls and women of different ages and socio-cultural backgrounds in the co-creation, the Frauenburo helped build housing projects, inclusive public transport systems, and gender-sensitive parks and playgrounds. The impact of gender planning centered around the urban structure (neighborhood level and daily life) and mobility (pedestrian issues, quality of public space, accessibility, and safety of public transport stations)
Vienna is one of the world's cities with the best quality of life and one of the fastest-growing cities in Central Europe. An iconic project is the Lake City Aspern, a suburban area that implements gender planning strategies. Quite uniquely, all the streets and public squares have the names of legendary women.
📖 City with a female face: how modern Vienna was shaped by women
🎥 Redesigning Cities and Suburbs for Women
Katrine Marçal, Journalist and Bestselling Author
By excluding women we warp the economy in ways that make it very hard to address the real problems we are facing.
Virtually every aspect of our existence – from the cars we drive and the luggage we carry, to the defining inventions of our past and the ideas that shape our future - is affected by our deeply held beliefs about the role of men and women within society.
Katrine Marçal is a financial journalist at the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter and a bestselling author and public speaker on women and innovation. She has interviewed many of the world's leading economic thinkers, from Nassim Taleb to Mariana Mazzucato.
She wrote Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? a book that challenges the discipline of economics that disregards the unpaid work of mothering, caring, cleaning, and cooking. Marçal also shows how different and better things could be if economics hadn't forgotten about women.
Her upcoming bookMother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored In An Economy Built For Men reveals the ways our deeply ingrained ideas about gender stifle innovation. Among the essential questions that Marçal raises are: Why did it take 5000 years to put wheels on suitcases? Why were electric cars considered "female"? Why does only 3 percent of venture capital go to women?
🎥 How Economics Forgot about Women
🎥 Katrine Marçal - May the 4th revolution be feminist Katrine Marçal
🎧 WOMEN DON’T UNDERSTAND THE ECONOMY & OTHER MYTHS WITH LINDA DAVIES & KATRINE MARCAL
📆 Mother of Invention – How the Ingenuity of Women Can Save the World | Katrine Marçal In Conversation With Caroline Criado Perez [June 23]
Subscribe to Katrine Marçal’s newsletter The Wealth of Women, a short feminist take on business, innovation, and economics
Follow her on Twitter
Caroline Criado Perez, Award-winning Writer, Feminist Campaigner and Broadcaster
Gender data gap is that it is not generally malicious, or even deliberate. Quite the opposite. It is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and is therefore a kind of not thinking. A double not thinking, even: men go without saying, and women don’t get said at all. Because when we say human, on the whole, we mean man.
During her time as an English Language and Literature student at Oxford University, she came across the linguistic concept of male default pronouns while reading a book by Deborah Cameron discussing gender's relationship to pronouns. The awareness of how language shapes our worldviews led her to reconsider her assumptions about feminism (until 2010, she was 'an anti-feminist).
Becoming increasingly aware of the disparities in women's representation in the media, politics, and education, Criado Perez started her first national campaign, the Women's Room project, to increase the visibility of female experts in the media. Her next campaign led to the featuring of renowned author Jane Austen on the ten pound note. Another successful campaign resulted in installing the first statue of a woman - suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett - in London's Parliament Square.
Criado Perez published her first book, Do it like a woman…and change the world, in 2015. It tells the stories of courageous women around the world.
Her second book Invisible Women Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men is groundbreaking. It exposes the gender data gap that has created a pervasive but invisible bias that profoundly affects women's lives, from daily inconveniences to higher yet preventable death risks. Drawing from case studies, stories, and new research from across the world it reveals the biased data that excludes women in various fields, from government policy, medical research, technology, workplaces, urban planning, and the media.
Criado Perez is the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize winner, the 2019 Books Are My Bag Readers Choice Award, and the 2019 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. She was the 2013 recipient of the Liberty Human Rights Campaigner of the Year award and was named OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2015.
🎥 'Why car design is killing women' | Caroline Criado Perez
🎧 Caroline Criado-Perez on the gender data gap | A Podcast of One's Own with Julia Gillard
Follow her on Twitter
Subscribe to the Invisible Women newsletter
Joana Varon, Executive Directress and Creative Chaos Catalyst at Coding Rights
We don’t believe in a fair, ethical and/or inclusive IA if automated decision systems don’t acknowledge structural inequalities and injustices that affect people whose lives are targeted to be managed by these systems. Transparency is not enough if power imbalances are not taken into account. Joana Varon & Not My AI team
Brazilian, with Colombian ancestry, Joana Varon is one of the leading voices for human rights-based development, deployment, and usages of technologies. She is the Founder and Executive Directress at Coding Rights, a women-run organization working to expose and redress the power imbalances built into technology and its application, particularly those that reinforce gender and North/South inequalities.
Varon is also an Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy from Harvard Kennedy School.
A former Mozilla Fellow, she is the co-creator of several creative projects operating in the interplay between law, arts, and technologies, such as notmy.ai, transfeministech.org, radarlegislativo.org, chupadados.com, #safersisters, Safer Nudes, protestos.org, Net of Rights, and freenetfilm.org.
📖 Decolonising AI: A transfeminist approach to data and social justice
📖 Consent to our Data Bodies lessons from feminist theories to enforce data protection - Joana Varon with Paz Peña
🎥 From devices to bodies: DNA data collection
Follow her on Twitter
Researching gender-equity in the physical and online world and the gender dimension of innovation has been eye-opening for me. It made me reflect on my own experiences living in different European cities and being a citizen of the Internet. During this summer, I’ll do a deep dive into the topic. Let me know if you are also interested in learning more about this or if you have any thought-provoking content to share.
Learn more about gender equitable cities:
Why are our cities built for 6ft-tall men? The female architects who fought back
What would a city that is safe for women look like?
What would cities look like if they were designed by mothers?
What would a city designed by women be like
What if the poor were part of city planning? | Smruti Jukur Johari
Why Is She Here? (Gendered Spaces) | Shreena Thakore | TEDxNMIMSBangalore
📆 How We Live Now: Reimagining Spaces with Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative An exhibition about Matrix, a feminist architectural practice based in London during the 1980s and one of the first worldwide to bring issues of gender center-stage to the design of the built environment. [Barbican, London]
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How Embracing Your Inner Artist Can Relieve Stress And Make You Better At Business
Thank you for reading this far! As always, hit me up if you have questions, insights and feedback to share!
Wish you a sunny and gender-equitable week ahead!
Anamaria
Founder & Writer @FemWealth