In Cairo, in 1989, i.e. two years after the first subway line was commissioned, the management body decided to reserve two cars per train for women (for young children and “vulnerable” people too). The cars are today situated at the centre of the train, and the arrangement operates either all day, or only between 9 a.m and 6 p.m. The research presented here, based mainly on the analysis of a corpus of press articles and international comparison, attempts to show the complexity of the reasons which led to this decision, and at a more secondary level, it was interested in how this arrangement was received by the public. It came to the following conclusions: that the separation of the sexes in terms of inclusion of women in urban life was ambiguous; that the feminist activists were ambivalent about this separation; that issues of sex and class were interlinked in the decision to create reserved cars; that the social relations of sex and class were consubstantial in how interactions played out in the subway environment, and in the reception of the separate car measure. These conclusions invite further research to give a more precise shape to the terms of these ambiguities and entrenchments; this will be the subject of the future MeTraGe programme.