Over 60 international speakers took part this week in the final conference of the DIAMOND and TInnGO projects, held online in conjunction with the 10th International Travel Demand Management Symposium. It was attended by over 150 people from academia, the industry, project members and associations and platforms advocating gender equality and inclusion, and policymakers from all over the world.
The conference showcased new conceptual approaches in transport and mobility, the findings of cross-European diversity and intersectional gender-sensitive data gathering, gender and diversity action plans, educational guidelines, new designs, corporate social responsibility protocols and practical tools to promote and achieve gender equality in transport through education and employment, white papers, curriculum guides, an observatory and a digital platform for self-assessment of equality and inclusion in transport operators.
DIAMOND and TInnGO were launched in late 2018 and funded by the European Commission as part of the Horizon 2020 programme under the “Demographic Change and Participation of Women in Transport” call. This is designed to ramp up the presence of women in the transport industry by assessing women’s needs and building tools and new technologies to measure their acceptance of different modes of transport as users and employees.
The DIAMOND project sought to “develop a self-diagnostic tool and protocols for the transport industry to foster more inclusive and efficient transport systems from a gender perspective by using machine learning, Big Data and non-discriminatory algorithms,” says Lali Soler, the director of the Big Data & Data Science Unit at Eurecat.
DIAMOND project members outlined the methodological approach followed by the key findings of a European data collection campaign to shed light on women’s needs, barriers and opportunities in public transport, bike sharing services and as users of autonomous vehicles and transport industry employees.
The main tools developed by the project were also presented, including a demonstration of a self-diagnosis tool to provide inclusion-related recommendations in diverse scenarios to achieve an equitable model in transport systems. The tool addresses transport operators and policymakers and will generate and publicise recommendations for a fairer and more inclusive transport system while also identifying mobility-related challenges from a gender perspective.
“We have tapped technologies such as data mining, machine learning and decision support systems to analyse and gather gender data and build a suite of self-assessment tools,” points out Patricia Castillo, DIAMOND project coordinator at the Eurecat technology centre.
TInnGO project partners also presented at the conference the one-stop Observatory (available at transportgenderobservatory.eu) for policymakers, scholars, journalists and social organisations involved in smart mobility. It includes an Open Data Repository, a survey on mobility patterns, an Open Innovation Platform featuring good practices and innovative design ideas, a learning centre with training materials and 14 inspirational case studies of successful women employed in the transport industry.
“A large part of TInnGO’s results would not have been possible without the work done by the ten hubs set up across Europe,” notes Andree Woodcock, a lecturer at Coventry University and TInnGO project coordinator. “They drew up ten Gender and Diversity Action Plans which can be translated into different cultural contexts to roll out gender- and diversity-sensitive smart mobility as a key component of a smart city.”
The conference also showcased a TInnGO education handbook for gender inclusion in the transport industry and the Gender and Diversity Action Plans (GaDAPs) which have been drawn up. TInnGO has devised a package of five Gender Smart Indicators (affordable, effective, sustainable, attractive and inclusive) which can be used to measure the extent to which transport solutions meet people’s needs.
