Improving gender inclusion in OpenStreetMap and beyond

GeoChicas are an international women’s mapping community with members in more than 12 different countries. Our aim is for women to have a greater presence and participation in key OSM events, increase female participation and leadership, and work on mapping projects which benefit women. Our main focus as a group is to help close the gender gap in the OSM community across participation, data creation and curation.

In celebration of International Women’s Day 2018, GeoChicas started a project ‘Las Calles de las mujeres’. This project focuses on producing of streets that are named after women in Latin America and Spain. The initiative aims to link and generate content about prominent women in OSM and Wikipedia by surveying street names and connecting them to biographies. This collaborative story-telling process through mapping aims to place an emphasis on the importance of remembering historical women, their struggles and achievements through public and digital space.

GeoChicas have also been conducting research on gender participation within the OSM community. Our recent gender survey was conducted in order to better understand the different perspectives and experiences around the concept of gender in the OSM community and to analyse the role, representation and participation of women in OSM. Through this research we hope to find a way to close the gender gap within the community.