Getting new users to contribute to collaborative mapping with OpenStreetMap sometimes can be a hard task, and even more difficult when you think about attracting new women users, especially if you are in a country like mine, Brazil.

Why do I speak of new women users? Because if you are in a country like mine, Brazil, most users are men, and this is not the reality in cartography courses, then why women in general aren’t participating, because they do not feel encouraged to participate, is that it?

In this text I will talk a little about my experience for you. Here in the group that I am part of with my college friends, we were having a hard time getting new girls to join the group and trying to understand this reality we met the group Geochicas OSM, a group of Latin America, a collective that came up with the idea of closing the gender gap among those who participate in the collaborative mapping project OpenStreetMap (OSM).

GeoChicasOSM created the project Las calles de las mujeres (The streets of women), collaborative project with the purpose of producing a map of streets named after a woman, with the goal of linking and generating content on OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia about prominent women.

So we think: How is the reality in Brazil? And from this questioning my group came up with this work for Brazil and we are analyzing the number of streets that are named after women in some Brazilian cities and despite so far realizing that there is a very large disparity, unfortunately, for every public space that honors a woman, there are 4 honoring men .

Even in face of this reality, we continue mapping the streets of our cities and several women have become interested in participating in this dialogue. This way we have concluded that in order to call more girls to join the participative mapping with OSM, we need to map questions that are important to women and while mapping, we discuss with men and women the importance of honoring women in public spaces, how important these spaces are, and even how safe they are for women.