ITF highlights urgent need for gender-responsive strategies as automation transforms metro systems worldwide.
Women metro workers are bearing the brunt of automation’s advance in public transport, with growing concerns over job security, conditions, and workplace equality. That was the key message from a global meeting hosted by the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) on 15 May 2025.
The meeting brought together for the first time women metro workers, union leaders, organisers, and activists from across the world to share experiences and coordinate union responses to the accelerating rollout of automation in a sector that is expanding around the world.
The conversation built on a growing body of ITF research that shows automation, while often framed as a solution for efficiency and modernisation, is too often implemented without considering its gendered impacts.
Noreen Hayes, from the UK's RMT union, emphasised that automation is not gender neutral and highlighted how the shift to new technologies is reshaping women’s roles on the London Underground: from job security to health and safety.
The “displacement” effect
According to participants, technological changes, especially the expansion of automatic ticketing and cashless payment systems, have already displaced thousands of mostly women workers globally. These roles, concentrated in ticketing and customer-facing services, have been particularly vulnerable to automation, something which accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A poll during the meeting confirmed the trend, with job losses identified as the top way automation is impacting women in metro. While automation has brought job cuts, participants noted it has also introduced health and safety risks, including increased exposure to violent physical attacks in under-staffed stations.
Voices from the Global South
Paula Rivas from FESIMETRO in Chile discussed how her union is advocating for a “just transition” approach, one that doesn’t leave women behind. This includes the negotiation of just transition clauses into collective bargaining and the creation of a Bipartite Just Transition Consultative Committee composed of workers and employers that will be consulted with every major introduction of new technologies.
Meanwhile, representatives from India shared progress on their Metro Women’s Charter, a union-led initiative addressing workplace gender equality and safety. The charter centres on four key themes: bullying and harassment, sanitation rights, gender rights, and workplace safety and security.
From research to action
The meeting builds on the ITF’s long-standing work on automation and gender. A 2024 ITF study highlighted how automation and cashless ticketing in cities around the world are triggering an “equality reverse,” as progress on gender equality stalls, or even reverses, under new tech regimes. Gendered impacts often go unacknowledged in public policy and employer strategies, further entrenching discrimination and systemic exclusion. It also supports the ITF’s Our Public Transport programme work on metro, which focuses on ensuring that major public transport investment benefits workers and passengers rather than corporate interests.
A call for collective action
Workers’ voices, including those of women, must be central in shaping the future of metro systems.
As metro networks expand and digital systems evolve, the ITF has pledged to build a stronger campaign on the issue of staff-less metros, with a focus on the critical – but often invisible – impacts on station operations.
“We must ensure that automation works for women, not against them,” said Claire Clarke, ITF’s Acting Women Transport Workers and Gender Equality Officer. “This is about securing decent work, equality, and dignity in the future of transport. There can be no automation without negotiation.”
