Safety First : Perceived Risk of Street Harassment and Educational Choices of Women

This paper examines the long-term consequences of unsafe public spaces for women

Abstract

This paper examines the long-term consequences of unsafe public spaces for women. It combines student-level survey data, a mapping of potential travel routes to all the colleges in the choice set, and crowdsourced mobile application safety data from Delhi. The findings show that women choose a college in the bottom half of the quality distribution over a college in the top quintile to feel safer while traveling, relative to men with comparable choice sets who choose a college in the top one-third of the distribution over a college in the top quintile. These findings have implications beyond women’s human capital attainment, such as their participation in the labor force

This work is part of the Measuring Violence Against Women in Public Spaces: Drawing on Experimental Evidence project

Citation

Borker, Girija. 2021. Safety First : Perceived Risk of Street Harassment and Educational Choices of Women. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 9731. World Bank, Washington, DC. © World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/36004 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO

Safety First : Perceived Risk of Street Harassment and Educational Choices of Women

Published 1 July 2021