Originally published here.

For the millions of working women in the world’s leading cities for doing business, daily life is often shaped by what they cannot do and how they’re excluded.

A Bloomberg Businessweek analysis of how 15 global cities rank for career women shows each failing in several ways. Toronto came in first, scoring 3.66 out of a possible 5, and São Paulo last, with a 2.68. The performance from best to worst reveals that structural and social gender inequalities remain rife everywhere.

The abduction of Sarah Everard from a London street in March by a police officer, who raped and murdered the 33-year-old marketing executive, spurred a furious uproar, encapsulated by one refrain on social media: “She was just walking home.”

Everard’s death put into sharp focus a societal failure to protect women from harm in the British capital. London, which performed well on equality and wealth in the ranking, was held back by its lack of safety, placing fifth overall with a 3.52. Even in places where it’s relatively safe to walk the streets, women are often underpaid or discriminated against at work, according to the findings.

The 15 cities were selected by Bloomberg journalists based on a few criteria: They’re all hubs of commerce in their respective regions, providing a global perspective on gender inequality, and most attract finance and business workers from elsewhere. The ranking is not an exhaustive list of major cities.

We graded them in five areas: safety, mobility, maternity provisions, equality, and wealth (a measure of earning potential and financial independence) and weighted those equally to form an overall ranking.

Each city was measured using publicly available data. Recognizing that data can be patchy and insufficient, we also surveyed at least 200 working women in each location and weighted their responses equally with the data for each of the five pillars of the ranking.

Cities such as Dubai, Hong Kong, and Singapore score high on safety but poorly on ensuring protections for women at the very bottom of the labor ladder. “These are the classic city-states with local labor force shortages that rely on hiring labor from low-income countries,” says Rosalia Vazquez-Alvarez, an econometrician and wage specialist at the International LabourOrganization.  

A significant number of women workers in these cities are employed as domestic cleaners, cooks, or nannies, and are either not formally registered as part of the labor market or simply not surveyed through regular data collection methods, says Vazquez-Alvarez.

European capitals such as Berlin, Paris, and London scored high because of strong maternity and legal rights. Germany offers paid maternity leave for 14 weeks, a generous parental allowance for up to 14 months, and jobs guaranteed for up to three years of parental leave; the U.K. offers six weeks’ paid leave at 90% of wages as well as up to a year off for women and the ability to take paid, shared parental leave.

Gender pay reporting in these European cities also helps ensure a more equitable workforce. However, they rated poorly on safety.

Still, even in cities that ranked relatively higher because of legal protections, such as Berlin and Sydney, women in the workplace face obstacles the higher up the ladder they climb. In Australia, Bloomberg reported about how the concept of “mateship” for male executives fosters an exclusion In Germany, a patriarchal work culture and the lack of good child-care support leaves women underrepresented in the top ranks in business and politics, says Annamaria Olsson, a Berlin-based author and founder of Give Something Back to Berlin, a nonprofit that connects migrants, refugees, and locals.

In London, Everard was walking home during a Covid-19 lockdown when she was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by a man later identified as a London police officer. In September, days before Wayne Couzens was handed a whole-life jail term with no possibility of parole for Everard’s murder, another young woman, 28-year-old teacher Sabina Nessa, was killed as she walked through a London park.

On average, in the U.K., a woman is killed by a man every three days, according to Femicide Census, which tracks lethal violence against women. Germany faces similar problems.

In São Paulo, only 10% of women surveyed for Bloomberg described the city as a safe place to live, despite recent laws specifically aimed at protecting women. Inequalities at work, including Brazil’s wide gender pay gap, also contributed to the city’s poor ranking.

It’s necessary to refine laws in São Paulo, to change Brazil’s “machismo culture,” so violence against women and the general population won’t be accepted, says Rachel Maia, board member of firms including miner Vale SA and the government-owned bank Banco do Brasil SA. She says she dreams of a day when citizens can “freely walk on the streets without the fear of being robbed or suffering an aggression.”

Mobility—closely linked to safety—is key to creating economic opportunities, according to Mayra Buvinic, senior fellow emeritus at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. “In a safe city, you are more able to look for jobs,” she says.

Nevertheless, the Asian capitals of Seoul, Hong Kong, and Tokyo were rated as comparatively safe places to live and work, but were undermined by poor wealth and equality scores.

In Tokyo, many women aged 35-45 quit their jobs as they get married and have children, and if they reenter the workforce, it’s often through temporary employment, says Yuriko Koike, who became the city’s first female governor in 2016. She says she’s aiming to expand child-care services and push companies to make it easier for men to take parental leave.

Numbers don’t tell every story. Amsterdam, famously a city for bicycles, rates poorly for mobility because our metrics focus on walkability and public transport. There are gaps in international data, specifically concerning violence against women, while reporting standards vary around the world.

Several cities that don’t provide transparent data, such as Beijing, Singapore, and Dubai, also rated poorly on measures of social freedom or equality. Yet they were given high scores by the women who answered our survey.

Economists agree that the pandemic has set back women’s gains everywhere, especially for working mothers who’ve had to handle a higher burden of child care amid school closures in lockdown. “The Covid-19 pandemic has affected consumer-facing industries the hardest, and they have a much higher female labor force,” says Vazquez-Alvarez.

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