Google Maps ‘Bike There’

Today is International Women’s Day - March 8.

C’mon - you mean to tell me that bicycles have played a part, and might still be able to play a part in helping to liberate women - wherever in the world they may face oppression??

Well, yes.

We first stumbled onto this aspect of bicycling when we read A Message from the President. That is, a message from David C. Joyce, President of Ripon College, and thought leader (as far as we can tell) behind the Velorution Project. He writes:

Interestingly, no single group benefited from the invention this advent more immediately than women. During the 1890s, the proliferation of bicycles helped women out of their corsets (in the collective sense) and steered fashion toward practical clothing. Likewise, Ripon College’s first four graduates in 1867 were women… another example of empowering women for the future.

How cool is that??

The bicycle wiki page has a bit more. Here’s the first graph from the wiki:

The diamond-frame safety bicycle gave women unprecedented mobility, contributing to their emancipation in Western nations. As bicycles became safer and cheaper, more women had access to the personal freedom they embodied, and so the bicycle came to symbolise the New Woman of the late nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States.

If that’s not interesting enough for you, then how about this link we found at the Freakonomics blog, which states that oil production is inversely correlated to women’s rights:

Why has the Middle East lagged behind the rest of the world in women’s rights and political participation? The strictures of Islam receive a fair share of the blame. Michael Ross of UCLA tells us otherwise. The real reason, he argues, is oil.

Michael spoke today at Yale about a new paper of his in the American Political Science Review. He argues that women’s participation in the formal labor force is a driving force in the development of women’s rights and participation. Oil production tends to crowd out local manufacturing, and so oil crowds out job opportunities for women. That is, the discovery of oil in a less developed country, he argues, sideswipes the development of women’s rights. The discovery of oil might even set back previous gains.

It gets more interesting. If you ignore oil, Islam tends to be associated (statistically) with poor women’s rights. After accounting for oil, that Islam-women’s rights correlation goes away. Variation in oil production seems to explain much of the variation in women’s rights within the Middle East, as well as between the Middle East and the rest of the world.

It’s far from proven - it’s just a paper - but wow, what if it’s true? What if it’s only partially true, or even only 10% true?

That would mean that more bicycling - with its corresponding decrease in demand for oil production (or even a slow-down in demand growth) - would imply/infer/create/correspond to a better/stronger women’s rights.

There are myriad economic and moral arguments for Google to provide bicycle directions in the main Google Maps interface, but of all the moral arguments - even if the oil study turns out to be flawed/wrong - the idea that we might be able to bolster human/women’s rights by promoting cycling is just way, way cool.