Who gets up for a pregnant lady on the subway?

Hi everyone! I finally got around to writing up some results from my little test: how many people get up for a pregnant woman on the New York subway? And what type of people get up (or don’t)? Welp, the least surprising results first:

People get up a lot more the more visibly pregnant you are. I had a summer delivery, so I have to imagine wearing fewer layers compounded this effect (me looking more obviously pregnant the closer I got to my due date).

Someone offered me a seat on almost 90% of my subway trips during that last super uncomfortable month of pregnancy (also: ugh - taking the NYC subway in July at nine months pregnant). Hurray for humanity!

I also noted who tended to get up by race, gender, and age. Obviously I had to guess at these categories, which may not have been totally accurate. (Side note: I am bi-racial, so slotting someone who is multiple things into one category is a pet peeve of mine, but I couldn’t think of a better way to do this that wasn’t overly complicated.)

I also noted who did not offer their seat. The number of people per trip who did not offer a seat could range from 1–6; I used common sense to determine how many seated people were within a reasonable distance to where I was standing. For example, it would not really make sense for someone more than a few feet away, especially on a crowded train, to offer their seat. If there were seats available when I walked onto the train, I did not record any results as it didn’t make sense for anyone to get up. Luckily for my data set, most of these data were collected on the C train, which was virtually always jam packed.

Let’s take a look at age first. In keeping with common sense, people in their 30s or 40s were the most likely to get up. The whippersnappers were pretty oblivious and super focused on their phones, while the older folks may have been tired or injured themselves.

Additionally, women were on the whole more likely to offer their seat:

But the gender breakdown varied a lot by race. If we look at these data by race and gender, the picture looks pretty different:

I thought it was interesting that there was a big discrepancy in behavior between genders for Hispanic and white people. Specifically, Hispanic men got up around 2x as much as Hispanic women, while white women got up 3x as often as white men. Asian people tended to get up less generally. (Side note: not many Asians or Hispanics were logged.)

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised to see how many considerate people there are on the NYC subway. A seat on a crowded subway car in the summer is worth its weight in gold, and people were offering their precious seats pretty liberally. I took the subway until the end — the day my water broke (thank God it didn’t break on the train). An entire bench of people chatted with my husband and me that day, seeming genuinely happy for us and offering up stories about their own deliveries and children. Perhaps New York is a friendlier place than it gets a reputation for.

A few additional thoughts and notes:

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