Benefits and Unintended Consequences of Gender Segregation in Public Transportation: Evidence from Mexico City’s Subway System

Abstract

Public transportation is a basic everyday activity. Costs imposed by violence might have far-reaching 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. The program seems to be successful at reducing sexual harassment toward women by 2.9 percentage points. However, it produces unintended consequences by increasing nonsexual aggression incidents (e.g., insults, shoving) among men by 15.3 percentage points. Both sexual and nonsexual violence seem to be costly; however, our results do not imply that costs of the program outweigh its benefits.