Most cities have a long-standing gender bias towards men when naming streets, squares, gardens, and other public places. While there is a somewhat recent trend to include more women when defining city names, most street names are well-established and hard to change. I wanted to at least a little bit on the subject starting with quantifying the gender bias where I live: Porto, Portugal.
Street names obtained from the Post office department of Portugal (CTT) Gender of each name determined by:
- Query to Wikipedia attributes using tidywikidatar R 📦
- Gender predicting function present in genderBR R 📦
Obs: some manual editing was necessary due to ambiguous and foreign names
Out of 1041 street names that can be attributed to persons, only 130 (12.49%) are women names.
- Contacting Porto's city hall to check if there's some form of organized data on when each street name was awarded and for whom
- Updating plots, tables and maps with latest street names review
- Scrape also Wikipedia Link whenever there's a Wikipedia page on a person whose name is on a Porto street