abstractDespite being a priority and target user group, women’s voices and their transport and mobility needs, experiences, and problems remain obscured and unacknowledged. The National Household Transport Survey (SANHTS), for example, which is an important evidence base directing transport prioritisations and policies in South Africa, does not take into consideration the multiple roles and responsibilities that women undertake and how this impacts their daily mobilities. This is despite growing evidence that women’s mobility and travel remain rooted in the values and assumptions of family, community, culture and tradition and that this influences how, when, where or who women travel with, their modal choice, what activities they participate in and the action spaces they inhabit. Instead, the hierarchisation and prioritisation of macro-level, urban, motorised, technocentric, technocratic and androcentric interests produces gender-blind transportation research and policy. This article examines the data produced in the SANHTS and the transport policy landscape to show that adoption of a gendered lens can (re)direct national data and research prioritisations, and concomitantly the construction of gender-sensitive transport policies and interventions. A primary aim of the article is to (re)invigorate debates, discourses and research interest in gender, women, mobility and transport rights in South Africa.
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