Streets are named for all kinds of reasons, but there’s a pretty fair chance that they represent an accolade of some kind for whoever or whatever they’re named after. Discover America, or at least a few islands in the Caribbean? Except streets all across that new land to be named after you, Christopher Columbus. Run out of ideas? Something with the word “King” should work.
And so, even without looking at the results of a seven city analysis of street names, we could probably predict that a majority of these people rewarded with their very own street name would be male. Most modern cities were founded a while ago, at a time when those esteemed in the community, and responsible for the city’s founding, were likely to be men.
But someone did do that seven city analysis. And the results are, well, exactly what you think.
The analysis, carried out by Aruna Sankaranarayanan and her team at mapping platform Mapbox, looked at street names in San Francisco, London and Paris, and the Indian cities of Mumbai, Chennai, New Delhi, and Bengaluru. After filtering out highways and running the names through an onomastics (proper names) script, they found that on average, only 27.5 per cent of those streets named after people were named after women.
