Abstract

This talk analyses how gender inequality shapes OpenStreetMap’s (OSM) tagging proposal process, revealing that diversity gaps intensify at higher participation levels. Maps are never neutral — their makers’ demographics determine whose realities are represented or silenced.

Systematically analysing every tagging proposal and vote since its creation using a purpose-built R package, we found that 59 prolific, mostly European and North American male users dominate proposal approval, while feminised proposals are underrepresented and disproportionately opposed. These findings confirm that structural inequities persist regardless of how well-designed, flexible and well-intended technologies may be.

Come and say hi

If you are attending State of the Map 2026, come along to the talk — we would love to hear your thoughts and experiences on equity and participation in OSM. More details are available on the conference website and the talk’s page.

About the talk

OSM is the largest and most successful collaborative map of the world. Like Wikipedia, it is based on principles of participation, openness, and neutrality to “map the world as it exists”. To that end, more than 10 million volunteers from different geographies and backgrounds contribute their local knowledge to add new map features or improve existing ones. Its data, covering the entire globe, is so exhaustive and precise that it complements official data sources and populates thousands of tools and popular services. Moreover, the UN-backed Digital Public Good Alliance recognised OSM as a global Digital Public Good in February 2024.

Enquiring about the world-views embedded in such a crucial project, and its mechanisms to avoid inequities against vulnerable communities, is critical to understanding the values that it produces and reproduces. This is especially relevant in the case of OSM for two reasons. First, because maps shape reality as much as they are shaped by it — for example by influencing the perception of the world, exerting political power and control, or affecting mobility, accessibility and consumption patterns. Second, because OSM’s community is estimated to be highly biased towards specific and hegemonic demographics, where white men from Europe and the US are overrepresented.

Our interdisciplinary research draws from critical geography and feminism to investigate how neutrality can be applied to either support or hinder equity. To achieve this, we are teaming up with Geochicas, a community-led organization from Latin America whose mission is to close the gender gap in the OSM community. Together, we are implementing a transformative participatory process aimed at co-designing data visualizations.

For us, data visualizations are not just an output to communicate findings, but a research method used to mediate and provoke ideas, discussions, and reactions that arise from thinking with and about data and its representation. Conversely, we understand participation and co-design as a way to consider the particularities of data, tasks, users, contexts of use and world-views of the participants — a condition for creating visualizations that are actually capable of being transformative.

The resulting visualizations will be different insofar as they will be based on lived experiences and informed by feminist principles. As a result, they will be better suited to assess how minoritized demographics — such as gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation — are involved, recognized, or excluded in data production and decision-making within OSM, while also empowering our participants.

We expect our findings to be returned to OSM and to inform potential transformations in OSM’s governance, database, and representation guided by equity principles. More broadly, we expect the findings to be adapted to other cases of digital goods and initiate similar transformations.

Slides

The slides from the talk are available as a PDF.

About the talk

Map-making is a serious business. There’s a science devoted to it, and only highly specialised companies and organisations can endeavour to translate every feature on Earth into a feature on a map with the right size and location. But that’s what makes maps reliable, too. So much so that, besides being part of our everyday lives, scientists use them to assess the effects of drought and deforestation, identify migration patterns or make predictions, amongst others.

And yet, all maps are wrong. All of them make assumptions about how the world is or should be, and in so doing, maps have particular built-in world views and become political. They define what is included and what is not, what can and can’t be done with them, and the stories that they convey. In other words: maps shape the world as much as they are shaped by it.

In this talk, we explained how maps are made in order to understand how they have been used to exert power — and how they are still doing so. We then focused on OpenStreetMap, a collective effort to “map the world as it is”, and how it is succeeding or failing to do so in an equitable way.

Slides

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