Benefits and Unintended Consequences of Gender Segregation in Public Transportation: Evidence from Mexico City’s Subway System± Arturo Aguilar† ITAM, CIE. Emilio Gutiérrez ITAM, CIE. Paula Soto Villagrán UAM, Department of Sociology ± This project was funded by the Inter-American Development Bank. We are grateful to Carlos Castro for his participation and insights for the study’s design. Francisco del Villar and Zeky Murra provided excellent research assistance. Aguilar and Gutiérrez acknowledge support from the Asociación Mexicana de Cultura. All errors are our own. † Corresponding author: Arturo Aguilar, email:
[email protected] ; ITAM, Camino a Santa Teresa 930, Col. Heroes de Padierna, 10700 Mexico City, Mexico; Ph. +52-55-56284000 -1- Benefits and Unintended Consequences of Gender Segregation in Public Transportation: Evidence from Mexico City’s Subway System Abstract For most people, transportation is a basic everyday activity. Costs imposed by violence in the public transportation context might have far reaching economic and social consequences. We conduct a survey and exploit the discontinuity in the hours of operation of a program that reserves subway cars exclusively for women in Mexico City to estimate its impact on self-reported sexual harassment. We find that the program seems to achieve its purpose: it reduces the incidence of sexual harassment towards women by 2.9 percentage points. However, it also produces unintended consequences by increasing the incidence of non-sexual aggression (e.g. insults, shoving) experienced by men in 15.3 percentage points. A willingness-to-pay exercise suggests that from a welfare perspective, it is unclear if the program conveys positive results.