Push to put women on map
Feminist mappers bridge online data gap in male-dominated world
WHEN Miriam Gonzalez started contributing data to the world’s biggest crowdsourced map from her Mexico City home five years ago, she found herself part of an odd group of volunteers.
It soon became clear that of the 1.4 million people globally adding information to OpenStreetMap (OSM), known as “the Wikipedia of maps”, most were men.
“We realised there were only a few women. So, there’s a bias in the crowdsourced data,” Gonzalez said.
The lack of women mappers is part of a bigger problem facing the tech industry, where women are underrepresented, said Patricia Solis of Arizona State University’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning.
“When you are looking at OpenStreetMap participation and you see very low numbers (of women), a lot of that is reflecting the larger issue of women in tech and in computer science,” said Solis.
To help close the gender gap, Gonzalez teamed up with two other OSM contributors to create a group of women mappers called Geochicas, in 2016. Contributors add data about landmarks, roads, forests, railways, rivers and buildings onto OSM and other places of interest in their communities.
The group has about 230 women volunteers in 22 countries.
“The (mapping) community is overwhelmingly male and this means women’s needs, interests and experiences are not reflected on maps,” said Yeliz Osman, a gender violence expert at UN Women.
“When women map, they are more likely than men to represent women’s needs and priorities, which is key to driving changes in policies, plans and budgets.”
Research published in GeoJournal last year estimated women account for 13% of all OSM contributors.
The all-male OpenStreetMap Foundation board said a reason women were underrepresented on OSM “might reflect aspects of societies, such as that many women have less free time than men”. “We are in favour of such initiatives that help increase diversity in our project,” the board said.
Geochicas has trained hundreds of women on how to use OpenStreetMap. Involving women in Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Paraguay and Uruguay, the group helps women add and tag places and services used by themselves and women they know.
It found that female mappers tend to add services often overlooked by men, such as hospitals, childcare services, toilets, domestic violence shelters and women’s health clinics. The needs and experiences of women differ from those of men, in part due to women’s traditional roles for children, elderly relatives and the sick.
Women also tend to focus more on safety concerns, Osman said, such as sexual harassment and other forms of sexual violence in public spaces or femicides.”
The free data and billions of GPS co-ordinates listed on OSM are used by companies to produce their own maps and overlay data from OSM to existing maps, while aid agencies often use OSM data to build maps to help them plan and decide where to focus their resources.
| Thomson Reuters Foundation