Gardner, Z. and Mooney, Peter and De Sabbata, S. and Dowthwaite, L. (2020) Quantifying gendered participation in OpenStreetMap: responding to theories of female (under) representation in crowdsourced mapping. GeoJournal, 85. pp. 1603-1620. ISSN 0343-2521

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Abstract

This paper presents the results of an exploratory quantitative analysis of gendered contributions to the online mapping project OpenStreetMap (OSM), in which previous research has identified a strong male participation bias. On these grounds, theories of representation in volunteered geographic information (VGI) have argued that this kind of crowdsourced data fails to embody the geospatial interests of the wider community. The observed effects of the bias however, remain conspicuously absent from discourses of VGI and gender, which proceed with little sense of impact. This study addresses this void by analysing OSM contributions by gender and thus identifies differences in men’s and women’s mapping practices. An online survey uniquely captured the OSM IDs as well as the declared gender of 293 OSM users. Statistics relating to users’ editing and tagging behaviours openly accessible via the ‘how did you contribute to OSM’ wiki page were subsequently analysed. The results reveal that volumes of overall activity as well editing and tagging actions in OSM remain significantly dominated by men. They also indicate subtle but impactful differences in men’s and women’s preferences for modifying and creating data, as well as the tagging categories to which they contribute. Discourses of gender and ICT, gender relations in online VGI environments and competing motivational factors are implicated in these observations. As well as updating estimates of the gender participation bias in OSM, this paper aims to inform and stimulate subsequent discourses of gender and representation towards a new rationale for widening participation in VGI.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Cite as: Gardner, Z., Mooney, P., De Sabbata, S. et al. Quantifying gendered participation in OpenStreetMap: responding to theories of female (under) representation in crowdsourced mapping. GeoJournal 85, 1603–1620 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-019-10035-z
Keywords:	Quantifying; gendered; participation; OpenStreetMap; theories; female; (under) representation; crowdsourced mapping;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Computer Science
Item ID:	13560
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-019-10035-z
Depositing User:	Peter Mooney
Date Deposited:	13 Nov 2020 17:16
Journal or Publication Title:	GeoJournal
Publisher:	Springer Verlag
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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