Stylist contributor Laura Bates, who collates women’s experiences of public harassment and assault on the Everyday Sexism Project, told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire show that she would “never suggest segregation is the answer”.

“It has to be about sending a clear message that this issue, which is already so normalised in our society, can be further normalised by the idea that women should simply go somewhere else,” she said.

Lord Adonis, Labour’s former transport secretary, told BBC Radio 5 Live that women would find the initiative “grossly insulting”, and criticised “the idea that they would be herded into separate carriages when the point at issue is a very tiny number of men who don’t behave properly”.

Women-only train carriages exist in countries including Japan, Brazil and Mexico, and the UK had some gender-segregated carriages until they were phased out in 1977.

A 2014 poll from YouGov and the Thompson Reuters foundation found that 45% of surveyed women in London would feel safer on segregated transport.

However, a report in the same year by Middlesex University, the Department of Transport and the British Transport Police recommended that women-only carriages not be reintroduced. This would, said the report, be a “retrograde step” that “could be thought of as insulting, patronising and shaming to both men and women”.

Images: iStock / Rex Features

This is why we’re debating women-only train carriages again