Validating gendered reporting behaviour on FixMyStreet.com

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Alex Parsons

FixMyStreet is an online issue reporting website that allows users to report issues in their area to the relevant level of government. This paper uses user-declared gender and automatically-derived gender for anonymous FixMyStreet users to validate the finding in Solymosi, Bowers and Fujiyama (2017) that different kinds of reports in FixMyStreet.com have differently gendered reporting patterns.

It investigates patterns of anonymization and the accuracy of automatically-derived gender and confirms the pattern of gendered reporting (where driving related reports are more likely to be made by men and walking related reports more likely to be made by women), as well as identifying a gender difference in user preference for anonymity.

Contents

1. Summary
2. Introduction
3. Methodology
4. Privacy and ethics issues
5. Results
   1. Gender-detection accuracy
   2. Anonymization
   3. Gendered categories
   4. Replication using self-declared data (only the 'original' variant)
6. Conclusions
   1. Acknowledgements

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Cite this

Parsons, A. (2019). Validating gendered reporting behaviour on FixMyStreet.com. [online] mySociety Research. Available at: https://research.mysociety.org/publications/gendered-reporting-fms [Accessed 28 Feb 2021].