OpenStreetMap
Peer reviewed paper on gender differences in OSM editing now available online
Posted by Geospa_gal on 2 July 2019 in English.Some of you will remember - and will have participated in - a demographic survey i conducted almost two years ago which aimed to establish whether there were any differences between the genders in the way contributors edit in OSM. Since then I have conducted several analyses of the data I collected and shared the results at several conferences. Each of the these papers is available on my researchgate profile which can be accessed from the following link.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Zoe_Gardner4
I’m delighted to announce that the following peer reviewed paper titled “Quantifying gendered participation in OpenStreetMap: Responding to theories of female (under)representation in crowdsourced mapping”, based on the data I collected from the generous OSM users that participated, has just been published and is accessible online using the link below.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-019-10035-z
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.
Since completing this study, I have conducted some further analysis on the same dataset and plan to publish the results of this in due course.
This kind of research, which focuses on those that have created this vast database, simply cannot happen without your cooperation and support so a huge thanks to everyone who participated in the survey and allowed me to access their edit history.
Discussion
Comment from imagico on 5 July 2019 at 10:24
Interesting read, in particular your analysis and discussion of the literature in the beginning and in the end. I am however somewhat underwhelmed by the analysis of the results of the survey. The idea of connecting information from a survey with analysis of the editing activity of the participants is in principle a very promising approach but i think you severely underuse the possibilities of it. In particular i think although you say you were mindful of the inherent limitations of surveying in this context you do not sufficiently reflect on how the lack of unbiased representation in the results of your survey affects your results. For example Figure 1 and 2 indicate a significant difference in average seniority of mappers who participated in the survey between men and women. This could be in itself an interesting point of analysis and discussion (possibly indicating either most women mappers became only interested in the project more recently or that female mappers have a significantly lower retention rate - that is stay active as mappers for a shorter time on average). Since it is fairly trivial that long time mappers of all genders will have on average different work patterns than newcomers it is not unlikely that the differences you observe do not actually have any relationship to the mapper being a man or a woman but can fully be explained by systematically different seniority of the male and female mappers who have participated in your survey.
Along the same line - you mention that you inquired about 5 demographic indicators (gender, age, educational background, location and country of origin) - but you do not seem to discuss the results of this (either in terms of differences between male and female participants or the representation of overall demographics in OSM).
I appreciate that you are often critical of bias and preconceptions you can find in the literature but i miss a critical reception of the widespread misunderstanding of the free form tagging system in OSM - in particular in Stephens (2013) - which you cite a lot. This is a scheme that runs through the vast majority of the scientific literature on OSM. The free form tagging scheme and the principle of any tags you like is one of the core principles and unique features of OSM and - as much as it is hated and despised by some people - has been central in making OSM what it is today. Discussing either data quality or social dynamics in the project without appreciation of this is always at least significantly incomplete.
Somewhat related to this your analysis of the numbers of different feature types does not seem to make the necessary differentiation between tagged nodes and untagged nodes. An untagged node in OSM is essentially a coordinate pair. Editing an untagged node is equivalent to making a geometry modification (of any kind of geometry, no matter if node, linear way, polygons or other types of relations). Without making this differentiation counting numbers of nodes edited is of relatively little use.
One other very useful addition to your methodological approach in general that comes to mind is that you could also analyze the whole mapper community (i.e. those who have edited in OSM but have not responded) as a third reference group. You could even differentiate this by indicators like seniority or region of main activity and thereby try to assess how much these factors affect editing patterns independent of possible distortions by selective response to your survey.
What would also be interesting to look at in the context of how mapper demographics affect the content of the database is how organized mapping projects fare in that regard (which meanwhile represent a quite significant fraction of editing activities in OSM). As mentioned here organized mapping projects usually instruct mappers collectively what to map and how to map it. In case of commercial organized mapping this is obviously largely determined by business interests. In the context of organized humanitarian mapping a frequent point of criticizm is that such efforts project a European/American mindset about geography and cartography on other parts of the world. It would be interesting to analyze if organized efforts in a similar fashion project either a male or female perspective and priorities on mapping.
Comment from redsteakraw on 6 July 2019 at 14:04
Interesting paper, this has confirmed my anecdotal thoughts on some things. However I would say that there is no bias towards men rather it is a project that men found interesting and decided to contribute to. OSM is open to everyone and if the default editor is not engaging to meet the needs of a community another one can be created. Look at wheelmap for example, the wheelchair using community needed the accessibility tags so they created an open and easy interface to update and add the tags they cared about.
OSM to me is non gendered as I largely don’t know the gender of the people contributing and largely don’t care. OSM has objective standards such as ground truth that seeks to weed out subjective gendered mapping. Furthermore there is no one really dictating what tags you use even if a tagging community disagrees with a tag you can still use a tag and bake it into an editor and there is no one to stop you. Most of the editors are opensource and will accept contributions.
I personally tried to find out what the broader female population’s POI preferences where and what they would like to see on a map and got the response that there is no preference they want the same things as men an accurate map they can just use. Map use in general isn’t a gendered activity but a utilitarian one thus the content isn’t controversial as long as it is accurate and based on ground truth.
That being said OSM does not have a bias toward any gender but rather was organically created by contributors and organically attracted like minds. Thus the under representation is actually a marketing issue / UI issue of attracting women to a technology project that organically grow attracted men. There is no reason why women or people interested in female participation couldn’t just make a frontend or editor that specifically caters towards women, my guess would be a mobile app that includes some social media integration which includes community building and interaction with other mappers. There is nothing stopping anyone from stepping up or trying to push forward a solution. Another way to promote female participation is to try to push OSM on female majority websites and you can try push them to use the new app. Much like how Pokemon Go uses ended up contributing when they found out their community uses OSM data.
What I would find unacceptable is shaming OSM or contributors because of the gender imbalance as OSM has been a volunteer organization and hasn’t put any gendered barrier nor has any discriminatory policies. I also would not find any solution that decreased any male participation acceptable. Rather I would like any solution to be an expansive change that grows the community and that growth skews female. This is what I call inclusive expansive growth. Then again I can be misinformed and my opinions could be garbage BS. What are your thoughts?