Ask ten women whether a city felt safe and you'll get ten answers. Our job is to turn that scatter into one honest number — and to be loud about how sure we are.
Most "safety indexes" you'll find online score a whole country, lean on crime stats that were never broken down by gender, and give you a tidy number with no idea how shaky it is underneath. That's fine for a headline. It's useless the night you're deciding whether to walk twelve minutes back to your apartment or pay for the cab.
We built the score we wished existed: city-level, women-specific, and always shown with its confidence. Below is the whole recipe — no black box.
The ten axes behind every score
A city's headline number is a weighted blend of ten measures. We keep them separate on every city page too, because "safe" means different things to a first-time traveller than to a nomad staying three months.
Night safety and freedom from street harassment carry the most weight — they're what women tell us changes a trip most. Softer axes like "ease of meeting people" count, but they never drag a genuinely unsafe city up into the green.
A score you can't question is a score you shouldn't trust. Every number here shows its receipts.
Where the data comes from
No single source is enough on its own, so we triangulate. Each axis pulls from three kinds of input, weighted by how reliable that input tends to be for that specific measure.
The weighting matters. For street harassment, lived reports count far more than official crime data — most harassment is never reported to police. For transport safety, the reverse is true: infrastructure records are more complete than any survey.
How confidence works
This is the part everyone else hides. A score built on 1,100 recent trip reports is not the same as one extrapolated from four. So we never show a number without telling you how much to lean on it.
See it on a real city
Enough theory. Here's how the recipe lands on three cities at very different points in the index — same ten axes, very different confidence.
Help make the next score better
Every trip report sharpens the index — especially for cities we're not yet sure about. Contributing takes about four minutes, and you can see exactly which axes your answers moved.
We're opening the full directory in 2026. Join the waitlist and you'll be first in — and first asked to help score the places you've actually been.