Female homelessness is therefore not simply a result of violence: it is a lead predictor of a woman experiencing violence.76 Women in the US are choosing to live rough rather than access shelters they perceive as dangerous.77 Katharine Sacks-Jones, director of women-at-risk charity Agenda, explains that in the UK homelessness services are ‘often set up with men in mind’, and that they ‘can be frightening places for vulnerable women who’ve experienced abuse and violence’.78
Gender-sensitive provision is not just about safety, however, it’s also about health. In the UK, homeless shelters can (and do) request free condoms from the NHS,79 but they cannot request free menstrual products. As a result, shelters can only provide menstrual products for free if they happen to have spare funds (unlikely) or if they receive a donation. In 2015, a campaign group called The Homeless Period petitioned the UK government to fund the provision of menstrual products as they do condoms.80 Despite questions being raised in Parliament, government funding has not been forthcoming, although in March 2017 the campaign group announced a partnership with Bodyform to donate 200,000 packs of sanitary products by 2020.81 Campaigners in America have been more successful: in 2016 New York City became the first US city to provide free tampons and pads in public schools, homeless shelters and correctional facilities.82
Female refugees have also not been spared the impact of the chronic global failure to account for the fact that women menstruate. Funding for this essential resource is often not forthcoming,83 and the result is that women and girls can go for years without access to menstrual products.84 Even where hygiene kits are distributed, they have traditionally been ‘designed for household-level distribution with no adjustment for the number of menstruating females in each household’.85 Distribution is also too often designed without regard for the cultural taboo around menstruation: expecting women to feel able to request menstrual products from male workers or in front of male family members;86 and not providing culturally sensitive products or disposal methods.87
These gaps in provision affect women’s health and freedom. Reduced to resorting to unhygienic substitutes (‘old rags, pieces of moss, pieces of mattress88), one study found that over 50% of women had ‘suffered from urinary-tract infections which were often left untreated’.89 And ‘because of the stigma surrounding menstruation and the risk of leakages’, women are restricted in their movements, unable to ‘access food, get services, information, interact with other people’.
Closing the gender data gap will not magically fix all the problems faced by women, whether or not they are displaced. That would require a wholesale restructuring of society and an end to male violence. But getting to grips with the reality that gender-neutral does not automatically mean gender-equal would be an important start. And the existence of sex-disaggregated data would certainly make it much harder to keep insisting, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that women’s needs can safely be ignored in pursuit of a greater good.
Afterword
The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences, in every page; the men so good for nothing and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome.
Jane Austen
It took about two hours for Daina Taimina to find the solution that had eluded mathematicians for over a century. It was 1997, and the Latvian mathematician was participating in a geometry workshop at Cornell University. David Henderson, the professor leading the workshop, was modelling a hyperbolic plane constructed out of thin, circular strips of paper taped together. ‘It was disgusting,’ laughed Taimina in an interview.1
A hyperbolic plane is ‘the geometric opposite’ of a sphere, explains Henderson in an interview with arts and culture magazine Cabinet.2 ‘On a sphere, the surface curves in on itself and is closed. A hyperbolic plane is a surface in which the space curves away from itself at every point.’ It exists in nature in ruffled lettuce leaves, in coral leaf, in sea slugs, in cancer cells. Hyperbolic geometry is used by statisticians when they work with multidimensional data, by Pixar animators when they want to simulate realistic cloth, by auto-industry engineers to design aerodynamic cars, by acoustic engineers to design concert halls. It’s the foundation of the theory of relativity, and ‘thus the closest thing we have to an understanding of the shape of the universe’.3 In short, hyperbolic space is a pretty big deal.
But for thousands of years, hyperbolic space didn’t exist. At least it didn’t according to mathematicians, who believed that there were only two types of space: Euclidean, or flat space, like a table, and spherical space, like a ball. In the nineteenth century, hyperbolic space was discovered – but only in principle. And although mathematicians tried for over a century to find a way to successfully represent this space physically, no one managed it – until Taimina attended that workshop at Cornell. Because as well as being a professor of mathematics, Taimina also liked to crochet.
Taimina learnt to crochet as a schoolgirl. Growing up in Latvia, part of the former Soviet Union, ‘you fix your own car, you fix your own faucet – anything’, she explains.4 ‘When I was growing up, knitting or any other handiwork meant you could make a dress or a sweater different from everybody else’s.’ But while she had always seen patterns and algorithms in knitting and crochet, Taimina had never connected this traditional, domestic, feminine skill with her professional work in maths. Until that workshop in 1997. When she saw the battered paper approximation Henderson was using to explain hyperbolic space, she realised: I can make this out of crochet.
And so that’s what she did. She spent her summer ‘crocheting a classroom set of hyperbolic forms’ by the swimming pool. ‘People walked by, and they asked me, “What are you doing?” And I answered, “Oh, I’m crocheting the hyperbolic plane.”’5 She has now created hundreds of models and explains that in the process of making them ‘you get a very concrete sense of the space expanding exponentially. The first rows take no time but the later rows can take literally hours, they have so many stitches. You get a visceral sense of what “hyperbolic” really means.’6 Just looking at her models did the same for others: in an interview with the New York Times Taimina recalled a professor who had taught hyperbolic space for years seeing one and saying, ‘Oh, so that’s how they look.’7 Now her creations are the standard model for explaining hyperbolic space.
Taimina’s fundamental contribution to the study of the hyperbolic plane does not, of course, close a data gap that directly relates to women. What this story shows instead is that the case for closing the gender data gap extends beyond women’s rights. Closing the data gap, as we’ve seen from the impact women have in politics, in peace talks, in design and urban planning, is good for everyone. Even mathematicians.
When we exclude half of humanity from the production of knowledge we lose out on potentially transformative insights. Would male mathematicians have come up with Taimina’s elegantly simple solution on their own? Unlikely, given how few men are keen crocheters. But in Taimina the traditionally feminine skill of crochet collided with the traditionally masculine sphere of maths. And it was this collision that led to the problem that many mathematicians had given up on as a lost cause finally being solved. Taimina provided the link the male mathematicians were missing.