Gender audits to assess how Paris spaces are perceived
The Paris City Council has decided that redesigning urban spaces without a prior gender audit is no longer considered progressive enough.
From now on, each project will have to undergo a special gender assessment examining how public spaces are perceived by men, women, sexual minorities and ethnic minorities. The city authorities have already signed a contract for the studies and assessed six pilot sites against 45 gender-related criteria.
In practice, the assessments focus on familiar urban infrastructure issues that city authorities would normally be expected to address anyway, including lighting, safety, recreational areas, green spaces, and the movement of pedestrians and vehicles.
However, the left-wing authorities in the French capital have chosen to frame these issues through an ideological lens, using the language of combating “toxic masculinity” while allocating public funds to the new programme.
The hope is that Moldova’s authorities will at least refrain from following this “progressive” European example. Otherwise, it could provide a lucrative new funding stream for organisations and LGBT activists.
