In recent years, there have been numerous academic and/or activist initiatives to document and visualise the gender gap in street naming, (sometimes including the names of urban facilities beyond just odonyms).
These initiatives contribute to the development of a Worldwide Geoweb dedicated to the gender gap in public space.
The Italian feminist activist association Toponomastica femminile launched a pioneering communication campaign on FaceBook in 2012 based on statistics comparing male and female odonyms. Following this original and strong initiative, which was widely reported in the international media, counts and monitoring were launched across Europe and Canada and beyond. Monitoring carried out by associations and journalists and facilitated by access to digital address databases and open access mapping (private or collaborative).
In terms of mapping, a first international and comparative project led by a Mapbox engineer (Aruna Sankaranarayanan) was a reference a few years ago. It has been acclaimed by several articles namely (and here), namely one in Bloomberg.com
The French website Matrimoine also appears to be in progress with an automatic extraction system which at this stage does not seem to provide a list of streets named after female figures throughout France, but which at this stage does not yet appear to be exhaustive or verified.
We obtain an european average of more than 90% for male figures versus less than 10% for female figures. Not to be confused with stats on total street names ( these figures are given by disregarding the large part ,often a small half, of names that are not personal names).
The « Paris Féminin » project carried out by Alcatela in partnership with @lamaisondfemmes, proposes an alternative archipelago visual based on all the objects named after women (12% of the total, men 66%): streets but also public facilities which are proportionally more numerous to be feminised. The result is very original even if the categorisation of monuments and facilities is questionable in their feminisation and grouping with metro stations and Parisian landmarks.
Special mention should be made of the most impressive academic project carried out at national level for the whole of Spain, which offers quantitative and qualitative analyses and visualisations at different levels, from the nation to cities and districts.
At European level, a collaborative project has been launch online in 2023, after a pilot project for Italy in 2021. Mapping Diversity is a project coordinated by OBC Transeuropa for the European Data Journalism Network, using OpenStreetMap database and map. It looks at the names of 145,933 streets across 30 major European cities, located in 17 different countries.
Finally, a collaborative map records and monitors all the places in the world named after Marielle Franco, the murdered Brazilian MP. In this way, the transnational movement supporting Marielle Franco’s political commitments against all forms of discrimination gives visibility to an ascending global political movement expressed through the multiplication of the Marielle Franco street signtargeted by the extreme right.
https://neotopo.hypotheses.org/5204
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Le journal du peintre 2 