OpenStreetMap
Results of OSM user demographic survey now available
Posted by Geospa_gal on 27 June 2018 in English.It’s been almost a year since 326 OSM contributors kindly participated in a survey of user demographics. The purpose of the survey was to attempt to measure the impact of the gender participation imbalance on mapping behaviours and patterns.
In April of this year I delivered my paper ‘Gender differences in OpenStreetMap contributor activity, editing’, based on the survey data, at the GISRUK conference in Leicester to an audience of GIS academics and professionals. This was well received and prompted a discussion of gender issues in OSM more broadly.
The three main findings of the analysis were:
- Not only are there more male participants than women, of those that participated, men are more active than their female counterparts with many more contributions and time spent editing.
- Men are more likely to modify existing edits whilst women demonstrate a preference to add new data
- Men contribute to a wider range of tagging categories than women
If you would like to read the short paper in full it is available as a pdf below. ]
Thank you again to all who participated.
https://www122.lamp.le.ac.uk/download/GISRUK2018_Contribution_045.pdf
Discussion
Comment from Zverik on 27 June 2018 at 16:59
Your work is awesome. We frequently talk about numbers, but as far as I remember, nobody before tried to measure what people of different genders map. Thanks for sharing!
Comment from imagico on 27 June 2018 at 18:16
Interesting results.
My gut feeling after reading is that the reason for the quite significant difference between men and women observed regarding types of features mapped could very well be partly due to men and women in the survey participating differently in organized mapping efforts. Most organized mapping focuses on certain types of features which could explain to some extent the differences in tag use observed if it plays a different role in the mapping of men and women analyzed.
The thing with organized mapping is that since this is usually not fully self determined (there are usually some kind of instructions on what to map with preference) this can kind of distort the attempt to find out what mapping preferences men and women typically have.
Likewise different preferences regarding outdoor mapping vs. armchair mapping could also result in different thematic mapping patterns.
But of course if women participate more frequently in organized mapping (or participate in different kinds of organized mapping efforts) or if they have a higher or lower preference for armchair mapping this would be a valuable observation on its own.
Comment from Zverik on 27 June 2018 at 18:39
Yes, splitting mappers by continent could provide some more insight: for example, in Africa and Asia there is a lot to be mapped, while in Europe modifying existing objects is often required.