What will Leeds look like as the UK’s first women-friendly city?

The campaign had a marked effect on the number of chest X-rays taken in the city, with 81 per cent more screened in 2015 than had been screened in 2008.

Yet while the rate of lung cancer deaths declined among men, deaths actually rose among women. The reason? Women often experience the “typical” symptoms of lung cancer - such as coughing - in different ways to men.

In spite of the leaps and bounds made in gender equality over the past few decades, oversights like this are still common.

In Leeds, as in many other cities around the world, women are still too-often ignored or obscured by studies, surveys and decision-making that relies heavily on men to represent the “typical” person.

The data on lung cancer rates among Leeds women could easily, in fact, have become just another buried statistic were it not thanks to Women’s Lives Leeds (WLL) collaborating with Leeds City Council to produce a unique report on women’s health in the city in 2019.

A partnership of 11 women and girls’ groups across the city, WLL was set up with the intention of helping women in Leeds live better, safer and healthier lives, from the workplace to the streets at night.

In 2019, the group won a half-a-million pound Comic Relief bid - delivered over four years - for a new, ambitious goal: making Leeds the UK’s first ever “Women Friendly City”.

What is a women-friendly city?

The concept was developed by the UN, with a women friendly city defined as a city where all residents - men and women alike - can “equally benefit from the financial, social and political opportunities presented before them”.

When it comes to making Leeds women-friendly, Nik Peasgood, Chief Executive of WLL is keen to point out that they won’t be starting totally from scratch:

“Leeds does lead the way in so many areas, it has a female leader of the council for instance...the city is very focused on trying to be more socially aware,” she said.

And while WLL has good foundations to build on, Leeds still has some way to go when it comes to gender equality - with domestic violence, unequal pay and sexual harassment among some of the issues still prevalent in the city.

Using UN parameters, WLL decided on several priority areas for making Leeds a women friendly city: safety, voice, influence and participation, employment and economic development, education and health and wellbeing.

Tackling safety issues

Safety in particular, Nik says, is an issue that regularly comes up in conversation with women in Leeds:

“Safety comes up all the time… there’s domestic violence and abuse, sexual violence. Women don't feel safe walking alone… that often comes up as a top priority, both for women and for girls,” she said.

As in many cities across the country, women regularly deal with sexual harassment and violence on the streets of Leeds. Women in the city also make up the the overwhelming majority of domestic violence victims (77 per cent) and sexual assault victims, (85 per cent) with many more cases never even reported to police.

In some other cities around the world, technology has paved the way for improvements in safety.

In Delhi, for instance, a woman named Kalpana Viswanath co-founded SafetiPin in 2013, an app that allows users to rate streets and areas for safety criteria like visibility, security and lighting to build a data-led map of safe and unsafe routes through the city.

In Barcelona, another city aiming to become more “women friendly”, the improvements have been physical, with Collective Point 6 - a cooperative of feminist architects, sociologists and urban planners - building safety features into the architecture of the city. This includes, for instance, having vegetation no higher than one metre, so you can see behind it, and maintaining trees so they don’t block lighting.

Educating and collaborating

Nik doesn’t rule out implementing similar schemes in Leeds later down the line. But given the group is in the very early stages of planning, their current focus is kick-starting the conversation and bringing together groups who can implement the kind of changes needed in the city:

“We're [WLL] aren’t [personally] going to implement a woman friendly Leeds. We’ve got the money to invest in starting the conversation, and the local authority are well on board with looking at that. We’re hoping that [women friendly Leeds] will get mainstreamed and that organisations will support the initiative”.

She points out, too, that a much of the work needed to even the playing field involves education rather than physical intervention:

“What Leeds doesn't do regularly enough is to look at the impact on women when we're looking at the decisions we’re making around equality”.

Nik illustrates this with the example of austerity: in 2017, a House of Commons report showed that 86 per cent of the burden of austerity has fallen on women, with ethnic minority women hit particularly hard. In Leeds specifically, women make up around 60 per cent of council tenants, while 74 per cent of all Bangladeshi women in the city reside in its most deprived areas.

But when decisions are made on how to tackle issues like poverty, these gender and race inequalities are rarely considered, leading to policies that don’t quite fit, or even worsen the lives of women. It’s why, says Nik, WLL are beginning by focusing on getting “the real stories behind people’s lives” to find out “how that can affect policy change, and what policy change there might need to be”.

Better for women, better for everyone

The conversations WLL have already had with women in Leeds have illuminated how this same lack of inclusion at the top feeds into all sorts of problems in the city.

Nik says many mothers, for example, have pointed out how many buildings are simply inaccessible to wheelchairs and prams. As the majority of care work for elderly relatives, disabled relatives and children falls on the shoulders of women, (nearly 60 per cent in Leeds) it’s a problem they experience more regularly than men:

“Mums have said it's incredible buildings are built that look nice and airy and fancy but you can't get a wheelchair in or they've all now got spinning doors and trying to get a wheelchair through a spinning door...it's not going to work”.

She uses this example, too, to illustrate how a city that is “better for women is better for everyone”. The women friendly Leeds campaign has had its fair share of criticism already, with many asking why the focus on women is necessary. Many don’t realise, says Nik, the extent of inequality in the UK:

“In developing countries women's rights might be significantly further behind in the UK, but we’re actually showing a widening gap between men and women in a lot of areas...the pay gap in Leeds has widened for example”.

Showing where these gaps are will be a crucial part of the education WLL hopes to do in order to convince the public, businesses and officials that a women friendly city is better for children, disabled people, the elderly, and indeed, better for everyone in it.

While some results - like better health outcomes and better pay - will be tangible and easy to measure, Nik says much of the work WLL will do in the coming years will be harder to measure: women feeling more safe on the street or feeling that their voice is being listened to.

Though she believes there’s an opportunity for huge improvements in Leeds, she stresses that:

“[In four years time] you won't get to a situation where you cross the border into Leeds and suddenly, one hundred percent of women are safe - it's not going to be a utopia”.

She adds, however, that a women-friendly Leeds would ultimately be a city where:

“Women are more respected, women's voices are heard more often, and that policymakers and commissioners consider the views and the needs of women when they're making decisions, changing systems to that they’re more equal than they currently are.

That’s not always very easy to evidence...but if we start talking about women’s experiences and how they can be taken on board, when these reports are drawn up around gender pay, domestic violence or health, we may actually start to see some changes in those figures”.