Columbus women feel safer than men, survey finds

The big picture: City Pulse 2025: The Magnetic City, published by design and architecture firm Gensler's research wing, examined residents' attitudes about a variety of issues in their home cities.

• About 13,500 residents were surveyed between July and November 2024.

Zoom in: Almost across the board, significantly more men than women said they feel safe in their cities — in some cases, the gap is as large as 15 percentage points.

• Conversely, 64% of Columbus women feel "safe" or "very safe" and just 59% of men feel the same.
• The only other city with a lower percentage of men than women was Minneapolis, separated by just 1%.
• Columbus women feel safer than all but seven of the cities surveyed.

Between the lines: Researchers aren't quite sure what to make of Columbus' outlier data.

• Sheryl Schulze, managing director of Gensler Columbus, doesn't have a definitive explanation, but she has some theories.
• Those include Central Ohio's fragmented downtown structure, differences in safe feelings by race, lack of public transportation and public spaces that feel less than welcoming.

What they're saying: Schulze's broadest theory is that this data set highlights a problem that isn't unique to Columbus — a "lack of civil trust and social connection" stemming from our disconnected, social media-fueled existence.

• "People have a tendency to interact and be more social with their phones than they are with others," she tells Axios.
• "Does that create some disparity here, where men aren't forming the meaningful relationships that they could, as opposed to women, who have a tendency to be more social than men?"

The bottom line: This data isn't an indication of how safe Columbus actually is.

• It "captures perception, not incident rates," Schulze notes.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to note Sheryl Schulze is the managing director (not editor) of Gensler Columbus.