RT Journal Article
T1 Do women commemorate women? How gender and ideology affect decisions on naming female streets
A1 Caballero Cordero, Victor
A1 Carmona Derqui, Demetrio
A1 Oto Peralías, Daniel
K1 Gender
K1 Ideology
K1 Street names
K1 Women
AB Street names are not neutral identifiers to navigate through cities but are charged with strong symbolic connotations and reflect power relations within society. A growing body of geographic scholarship documents a strong gender bias in the urban namespace, where women only represent a small fraction of streets named after people. This article investigates whether the lack of women in political decision-making roles contributes to explaining their marginalization in urban toponyms. More specifically, we study the impact of the gender and ideology of town mayors on their decisions to commemorate women in the street map. Focusing on the universe of Spanish towns during the period 2001–2023, we find through fixed effects panel data models and regression discontinuity design that the mayor's gender does not affect the percentage of female-named streets, while the ideology of the governing party does. Our findings thus indicate that it is ideology rather than gender what shapes politicians' preferences regarding the commemoration of women in the street map. We argue that this is because, on the one hand, strong political parties can impose their agenda on local leaders, making irrelevant differences in their gender and, on the other, the ideological cleavage is more relevant than the gender one to account for differences in attitudes towards symbolic gender policies. A natural implication of our results is that simply having more female politicians will hardly suffice to address the gender gap in street names and in other symbolically charged policies.
PB Elsevier
YR 2024
FD 2024-12-03
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10433/22066
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10433/22066
LA en
NO Víctor Caballero-Cordero, Demetrio Carmona-Derqui, Daniel Oto-Peralías, Do women commemorate women? How gender and ideology affect decisions on naming female streets, Political Geography, Volume 116, 2025, 103244, ISSN 0962-6298, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103244.
NO Junta de Andalucía-FEDER I + D + i project P20_00808.FEDER-UPO  UPO-1380998.
NO Departamento de Economía, Métodos Cuantitativos e Historia Económica. Universidad Pablo de Olavide.
DS RIO
RD Apr 23, 2026