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Friday, March 29, 2024 | Back issues
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Gender Bias Lingers in Street Names of Global Cultural Centers

A team of researchers from the U.S. and U.K. analyzed streets named after people in New York, Vienna, Paris and London. They found gender bias, even in our most culturally aware cities.

(CN) --- Despite perceived heightened cultural sensitivity in the modern age, women lag far behind men in a widely accepted method of bestowing honor in the world’s cultural centers --- street names, according to a study published Wednesday.

A transatlantic group of researchers analyzed 4,932 streets named after people in Vienna, Paris, London, and New York, and the gender bias they found was surprising according to Marios Constantinides, a research scientist at Nokia Bell Labs in London and author of the study “Streetonomics: Quantifying Culture Using Street Names." Constantinides' work was published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE.

“We still see these patterns that women are not celebrated as much as men,” Constantinides said.

He and fellow researchers from Nokia Bell, CUSP Kings College in London, and Washington University in St. Louis gathered available databases that included the dates the streets were named and the location within the cities. Then they looked at the gender, country of origin, profession, and historical period of each honoree to compile a glimpse of underlying culture --- a process they dubbed “streetonomics.”

Among streets named for people, Vienna had the highest percentage named for women (54%) followed by London (40%). In New York, 26% of the streets carry women’s names, and in Paris just 4%. The researchers note that many of the Parisian names stem from the 1860s, when Napoleon III transformed the city, and many London names date to the 1700s and 1800s as the city grew after the Great Fire destroyed much of the city center in 1666.

In Vienna, 45% of street-name honorees were foreign, followed by London (15%), Paris (11%). New York, where a third of honorees were 9/11 victims and emergency responders, named just 3% for foreigners, the study showed. Most New York streets were named for late-20th century figures, because the city used a numbers-only system until 1998 when a co-naming system allowed the city to add names.

The research showed an impact from war, especially in Vienna and Paris, Costantinides said.

“We could see clear patterns in names that were celebrated after significant military conflicts,” he said.

Between wars, street names tended to shift toward artists and scientific figures in Europe and artists and entertainment figures in New York, he said.

The researchers hope the study will be replicated to give anthropologists a way to track cultural change over time. As more data becomes available globally, other similar studies could offer a broad picture of shifting culture, Constantinides said.

“Ideally we would cover the whole world, right?” he said. “It’s another way of having historical awareness.”

Categories / Science

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