Night-time Mobility | Exploring Gender and Safety After Dark
The Global Peace Index report ranked the Philippines 104 out of 163 countries in 2024. Meanwhile, Forbes ranked Manila as 5th riskiest city for tourists in 2024. Our streets, especially in urban areas, have a reputation for violence and criminality.
We have changed very little in our perception of safety in our neighborhoods since the 1990s. Around half of their sample say that they are usually afraid to walk in the streets at night. Based on multitude of studies, women are more afraid of going out than men.
Using GPS data, can we quantify this? how can we measure this fear of night?
Running a survey is time consuming and susceptible to internal biases of the respondents especially for a gendered issue like this. We will use gps data to actually check and compare the night time activity of males and females.
Activity Space
Our approach is simple, based on gps data, we can look at how active our individual sample are at night (defined here as 8 pm to 3 am). We measured the area occupied by people in a given time frame. The idea is the bigger the area a person travels around at night, the higher his or her perception of her safety. We can measure the average area females occupy at night, then compare that to their male counterparts.
Activity space aims to capture all the places that an individual travels to in a given time frame. One way to calculate this is by taking the smallest polygon created by the coordinates of a person in a given time period. This is the minimum convex hull approach.
Source: Activity spaces in studies of the environment and physical activity: a review and synthesis of implications for causality.
Aside from comparing between males and females, we also wanted to see whether we will see difference across various cities in the country. Since cities have varying reputation of safety, we think that it will be interesting addition to our analysis. We will start in Quezon city, the only city in the country that is part of UN Women’s Safe Cities and Safe Public Spaces Global Initiative. This international initiative focuses on making urban public spaces safer and more inclusive, especially for women and children.
We expect a drop in activity space area at night, and further into midnight – for both males and females. What we did not expect is the consistency of the gap before 12 am. From 8 pm to 12 am, women always have reduced mobility than men. At 8 pm, we found the gap to be around 0.4 hectares which is around 8 basketball courts. As expected, we saw the level of activity decrease as we approach midnight – for both males and females.
We recognize that this could be driven by the fact that there are still more working males than females – in turn more stay at home moms. Although in a way, it can be argued that this culture stemmed around ensuring the safety of women from night time violence. Nevertheless, one way to reduce this factor is to compare night time activity during weekends and weekdays.
Weekdays and weekends
The idea is that during weekdays, both sexes (especially for those employed or has night time duties), are bound to go out at night. Meanwhile, weekends present a choice – those who choose to go out have some level of confidence about their safety without the obligation of work or other duties.
With the same sample, there is a slight decrease in the average activity space area for both sexes during weekends. For males, from 1.2 hectares for weekdays, this is now down to around 1 hectare for weekends. The bigger take-away is that women have a larger area of activity at 9 pm during weekends than weekdays. This might suggest that in Quezon city, women are willing to go out / stay out at night during weekends.
That last observation led me to do this analysis to other cities as well. I still had so many questions, and I hope you do too. Let’s look at another one and compare it to Quezon City.
For Makati, both sexes have very similar weekend and weekday activity footprints for 9 pm onwards. Makati is known for its nightlife activities, which could explain the difference with Quezon City.
Davao, a city known for its commitment to solving crime and violence, has one of the biggest gap in activity space area among the cities we compared. Men in Davao City have twice the level of night time activity than women during the weekdays. Several factors may be contributing to this trend including, more stay at home moms, less women doing OT or night shifts, more males using gps to navigate in the city, women discouraged to go out for safety concerns.
Aside from the big gap, we also revealed a limitation of this analysis, in terms of comparability of area among cities. The average activity space area of men in Davao is around 3.7 hectares, 26 times bigger than that from Makati. We believe this huge difference is most probably related to the relative size of Davao City to Makati – bigger city, more space to move around.
Let’s look at another city outside metro manila, Cebu.
The gap in Cebu city is the biggest we’ve seen so far. Even for weekends past 9 pm, men have twice or more activity space area than women in the same time frame. Additionally, at 10 pm, men have larger area of activity in the weekends than weekdays. The activity space of women in those time period stayed the same.
For our last chart, let’s look at the city with the highest crime rate in the country – Manila.
Manila City has the biggest difference in terms of night-time activity during weekends and weekdays – especially for males. This suggests that both males and females, outside of work schedule, chooses to stay at home and reduce their mobility. The effect for Manila is the highest among the cities we compared. Fear of the streets of Manila could be a major factor in driving the activity level down.
What remained consistent among all the cities is the gap between males and females. To better visualize:
The size of the bubbles corresponds to the activity space area per gender. Davao leads with the biggest activity space area while evenly developed cities like Manila and Makati are low on this chart. Men in Davao travel approximately the size of a standard football field. This could be explained by the idea of low mobility in a connected city. There are still parts of Davao that you need to travel far to go to work, leisure, etc. Basic needs are more accessible to residents in Makati even at night, which explains the small activity space.
Summary
Experts have analyzed how activity space reflect urban challenges (and opportunities) since its inception in the 60s. In addition, we considered the including night-time mobility to compare perception of safety among genders as another dimension in this discussion. In this article we have shown through data, that women do in fact feel more vulnerable going out at night than men. More than that, given the consistency of results, we speculate that more than safety, this is also about opportunity. We hypothesize that there is an even bigger gap. A gap in everyday level of activity due to perception of safety, employment inequality, gender roles (stay at home moms) etc. Unfortunately, this article is too long already.
In our next article we will investigate the effect if we look at all day not just night. Furthermore, we will look at using other metrics like travel distance, radius of gyration etc. We will also add age segmentation, commute behavior, and other relevant and available dataset.
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