You can tell a lot about the history of a place by its street names — Houston, Texas has Robert E. Lee Road, for example — but what, if anything, does the gender breakdown of a city's streets mean? A series of maps released on Tuesday highlights the gender disparity in street names for seven major cities around the world, including San Francisco.
The engineer behind the project, Aruna Sankaranarayanan, explained the results in a blog post earlier this week.
"The results are fascinating, and maybe not surprising: streets named after men are more numerous and more centrally located than streets named after women in the metro areas we analyze," wrote Sankaranarayanan. "Between Bengaluru, Chennai, London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Paris, and San Francisco, the percentage of streets named after women is an average of 27.5."
No specific numbers for San Francisco are presented, but the map does have a pretty strong blue tint to it.
As to the process used? Citylab notes that while not without flaws, the mapping program Sankaranarayanan created was mostly accurate.
"[The] software predicted San Francisco’s McAllister Street, named after American attorney Matthew Hall McAllister, as male and Octavia Street, named after a woman identified as the sister of a politician, as female. (The program isn’t perfect; it incorrectly labeled streets like Van Ness Avenue and Starr King Way—both named after men—as female.)"
It is worth noting the persistent rumor that many streets in San Francisco, especially in SoMa, named for women (Jessie, Clementina, Mary, etc.) were in honor of famed 19th Century prostitutes. No one's been able to confirm it, it seems, but it stands to reason that in a gold-rush town teeming with men, some sex workers achieved a certain level of fame.
However, besides Octavia Street/Boulevard (named for Octavia Gough, the sister of Charles H. Gough, a contractor who served on the original street layout commission) and the aforementioned alleys, it does seem that most of the streets in San Francisco are named for men (especially Gold Rush millionaires, and military men).
What, if anything, does this tell us about San Francisco?
”Street names sort of define the identity of a place,” Sankaranarayanan told City Lab. By highlighting the gender breakdown of our street names, the engineer hopes to make us all a little more aware about the place we call home.
Related: Who Octavia Street Is Named After, and Other Fun Facts From a New Interactive Street Map
