Does San Francisco Have Mostly Gender-Biased Street Names?

The gender behind street names isn't something that we take the time to think about very often. But a new interactive map from Mapbox developer Aruna Sankaranarayanan and her colleagues visualizes "male" and "female" streets in several cities around the world, including San Francisco. Among the seven cities studied, only 27.5 percent of streets were named after women (after gender-neutral streets were filtered out). Indian city Bengaluru tops the list with 39 percent. There's no exact figure given for San Francisco, but the streets look pretty blue.

CityLab, which picked up on Sankaranarayanan's map, notes that San Francisco's McAllister Street was named after an American male attorney, while Octavia Street was named after a woman who was the sister of a politician. It also points out that the program makes some mistakes—it incorrectly labeled Starr King Avenue, for example, as female. The gender of street names first grabbed headlines back in August when a feminist group in Paris renamed 60 streets to protest the fact that just 2.6 percent of streets in the City of Lights get their monikers from females. Sankaranarayanan saw a tweet about the issue and subsequently made this map.

· Mapping the Sexism of City Street Names [CityLab]
· Mapping Female Versus Male Street Names [Mapbox]