Feminist Geography: Redrawing Gender Bias, From Street Names To Public Restrooms

BOGOTÁ — Why are the lines for the women’s restrooms always longer? Why do streets almost exclusively pay homage to male figures? At first glance, these questions may seem like irrelevant details. Yet each reveals a truth that is already beginning to be studied in some areas of knowledge: Space can also discriminate.

Historically, spaces including public areas have been designed, managed and represented from a masculine perspective, responding to their needs, bodies and ways of living. From ancient times to the Middle Ages, the figures who defined the maps and boundaries of the known world, such as Ptolemy, Mercator, and Ortelius, were all men. And their representations of the territory served imperial and patriarchal projects.

Later, with the consolidation of modern cities, urban planning and transportation design began to prioritize linear routes from home to work, designed for productive men but ignoring the multiple routes women took when their work was limited to caregiving. According to the report “Cuerpos que se mueven” (“Moving Bodies”) by the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, this bias remains present in most urban mobility systems in Latin America.

Feminist geography

Feminist geography, a critical movement that has emerged in recent decades, is based on the premise that space reflects relations of power and gender. For Selene Yang, a Costa Rican researcher and co-founder of the GeoChicas feminist mapping group, this division begins in the most everyday.

“The distribution of space isn’t just about knowing how to read a map. It’s about minimum access to certain rights: access to sexual and reproductive health services, the feeling of safety in public spaces, or the representation of women and people with diverse gender identities and sexual orientations,” Yang says.

From her experience working with cartography, geospatial data and gender-focused research, Yang has observed how exclusions are reproduced even in seemingly trivial factors, such as the inefficient layout of women’s restrooms — which are overcrowded more frequently than men’s.

“These situations, which are so common to us, are the result of designs and processes that exclude women and put their needs in the background,” she says. Yang also observes that over time it has become natural to think of certain spaces — such as the kitchen or the home — as feminine, while the public and productive spaces — where important decisions are taken or money is made — belong to men.

“The kitchen is the heart of the home, they say. But they say this because the person who manages that heart is usually a woman. Without her, the home has no heart,” she emphasizes.

Practical and symbolic exclusion

For Yang, these spaces were not freely chosen, but were historically assigned as part of a functionalist model that hides the well-being, autonomy and decisions of those who inhabit them. Yet the spatial exclusion of women is not only practical but also symbolic.

In their Las Calles de las mujeres — “Women’s Streets” — project, Geochicas analyzed street names in cities across Latin America and Spain. There is a clear pattern: The vast majority are dedicated to male figures and are located in the most central and relevant places for social interaction (squares, town halls, parks, etc.), while the few female names are usually dedicated to religious figures.

What is it that keeps us women confined to the private space and the rest of them in the public space?

In Bogotá, for example, only 3.5% of streets are named after women, generally referring to figures such as Catholic Saints Barbara or Lucía. Yet there are no streets named after relevant female figures of Colombian history like Policarpa Salavarrieta, considered a heroin of Colombian independence in the early 19th century, María Cano, an early 20th century trade unionist, or Manuela Beltrán, another fighter of the independence period.

“What keeps women confined to the private space and the rest in the public space?” Yang asks. For her, spatial oblivion is also a form of exclusion, illustrating the lack of recognition of women as historical subjects and legitimate inhabitants of public space. “You can see that even in the way a street is named.” 

A new look at maps

From a feminist perspective, cartography can challenge these practices, transforming the function of what is represented on maps. “The map has always been a device of power. Feminist cartography reframes it and puts it at the service of our needs,” Yang says. Data from the OpenStreetMap community itself show that less than 5% of its contributors identify as women. This means that, even on collaborative open data platforms, representation remains unequal.

GeoChicas, which brings together more than 230 mapmakers, geographers, anthropologists, programmers and communicators from 30 countries, has sought to shed light on a phenomena ignored by traditional cartography, with maps of feminicides, safe routes, labor and academic exclusion, and feminist mobilizations, including those on March 8 — International Women’s Day.

These maps not only show what’s happening but also record how the political and social conditions of women are changing in different territories. All of this is possible through free, collaborative digital platforms like OpenStreetMap. 

Feminist geography is not limited to changing street names or improving public signage; it is about rethinking the way we consider and organize space, starting with the recognition of diverse bodies with different needs and the impact our surroundings have on our everyday experiences.

“Rethinking space also means recognizing who has historically been marginalized in its construction. And beginning to draw, from different perspectives, the boundaries of a more diverse territory,” Yang concludes.