“It feels like boys matter more,” says ten-year-old Molly during an interview for the podcast Visible Women, in which Caroline Criado Perez explains how the lack of data and design around how women and girls use public spaces results in public environments designed solely for the default gender: the male.
Unfortunately, Molly’s feeling is neither an isolated case nor a new situation. In the early 1990s, Eva Kail and a team of sociologists observed in Vienna that, from the age of nine onward, girls stopped visiting parks while boys became the dominant group in these spaces. Upon closer investigation, they discovered that this behavior was due to a design problem. Put simply, those who designed Einsiedlerpark (Hermit Park) only integrated male interests into their proposal; and though girls walked through the space two or three times a day, nothing invited them to stay.
