In Pursuit of Equality, French Cities Adopt Gendered Budgets | Hacker News Reader

In Pursuit of Equality, French Cities Adopt Gendered Budgets

bloomberg.com

5 pointschippy4 comments

Is this going to be like the Swedish feminist snow shovelling where they focused on shovelling snow from the sidewalk instead of the road, in the name of “gender equality”? To no one’s surprise the result was an increase in car accidents, traffic delays and disruptions. The initiative was dropped because it was, simply put, ideological insanity.

This budget sounds to be the same. What even in a “gendered budget”?

[Swedish insanity](https://www.thelocal.se/20161112/stockholm-transport-heads-d...) - Yes, it’s an old article because they stopped this due to how bad the consequences were.

I know that I'm replying to a throwaway account on a buried topic, and not that many people will read either of our comments, but for those that do just know that the above is misleading at best. At the very least a quick google search will show you that there are a fair amount of articles written about Stockholm's snow clearing policies after 2016:

2017: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/05/sweden-gende... 2018: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/01/24/why-sweden-clears-wal... 2019: http://info.gritit.com/blog/what-is-gender-balanced-snow-cle... 2020: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/02/03/how-other-cities...

Not quite as many as in 2016, but mostly because a particular subset of the internet went into a frenzy about the news of Stockholm dealing with an unusually large volume of snow. Daniel Helldén, Stockholm's vice-mayor of transportation said: "We had more snow in two days than we had had for a 100 years. So the problem hadn't anything to do with gender-equal snow clearing." https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/gender-analysis-budget-snow...

In the end the change in policy resulted in less injuries and deaths, as most of these were happening to pedestrians in the first place (who happened to be mostly women, versus mostly men driving). Other cities in Sweden went on to take this approach and other countries, like Canada in the last link, are interested in taking this approach too. It turned out they did not stop "this due to how bad the consequences were" and it turned out not to be, "simply put, ideological insanity" but an interesting way to approach what appears to be common sense from a different point of view and seeing if there are ways that we can improve things (something, something... tech disruption... something, something...)

Stockholm's snow clearing policies are the subject of the first chapter of Caroline Criado Perez's book, Invisible Women, which has dozens of such examples. It's an interesting read, and I'd recommend it.

You can't solve an egalitarian issue with money. Placating a specific set of people will do nothing. You need a stark cultural change. That happens organically over time as laws are enforced. If you don't do that, you might as well give up because as soon as the money stops flowing, so does the cultural belief that there is egalitarianism between the sets of people.

If we're going for specificity, we may as well just do basic income.

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