Everyone Knows Women Are Too Emotional To Inspect Track

Maybe instead of spending $6.7 million on “platform conductors” whose job it is to make sure everyone is aboard the train, the MTA can ante up a little bit for sensitivity training:

While most of the city sleeps, Ronda Rivers treads where few women dare go: the dark and dangerous subway tunnels below downtown Brooklyn.

A sledgehammer slung over a shoulder like a baseball bat, the 36-year-old city track inspector steers clear of the electrified third rail and its deadly current.

When a train rumbles around a sharp curve, she nimbly pulls herself up several feet to a narrow catwalk, dropping back down when the roaring rig passes.

She is the Transit Authority’s only female track inspector and one of just 21 women who work in the division, a difficult assignment also held by about 1,800 men.

“I don’t like working behind a desk, pushing pencils,” she said during a brief predawn break on a recent morning at the Pacific St. station. “I like physical activity. I’m ambitious. I feel I can do what a man can do.”

But somebody who walks the same tunnels has a problem with that.

Last month, Rivers and Tanya Jerry, 30, a flagger who alerts train operators when track workers are in the tunnels, found a blizzard of derogatory graffiti.

The sexist messages near the Pacific St. station were written in the same kind of yellow chalk issued to TA maintenance supervisors and track inspectors.

“Women should be cleaners, not track inspectors,” the graffiti read. “Women don’t belong on track.”

The Pacific St. tunnel is part of the women’s assigned area, one of the most dangerous in the system because of its many curves.

Though some male co-workers and managers have made inappropriate and offensive remarks in the past, Rivers said, the graffiti bothered her even more.

“I was offended and it was humiliating,” she said. “It was very hostile.”