Validating gendered reporting behaviour on FixMyStreet.com

Read Online Plain Text Kindle .mobi Download PDF

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. Introduction
2. Methodology
3. Privacy and Ethics issues
4. Results
   1. Gender-Detection Accuracy
   2. Anonymization
   3. Gendered Categories
   4. Replication using self-declared data (only the 'original' variant)
5. Conclusions
   1. Acknowledgements

Related Items:

• 

  FixMyStreet: The geography of citizen reporting

  • Peter Matthews
  • Alasdair Rae
  • Elvis Nyanzu
  • Alex Parsons

  December 2018

• 

  Civic Tech Cities

  • Rebecca Rumbul
  • Emily Shaw

  May 2017

Cite this

Parsons, A. (2019). Validating gendered reporting behaviour on FixMyStreet.com. [online] mySociety Research. Available at: http://research.mysociety.org/publications/gendered-reporting-fms [Accessed 11 Dec 2019].