Geochicas is a young initiative with big challenges. The first gathering was in SOTM Latam Sao Paulo in 2016 and since then, we haven’t stop our efforts to make OSM members aware of the lack of diversity in our community.

Geochicas has developed an ongoing discussion about the need to create more initiatives that encourage participation of women in OSM, their active role in decision making spaces and more projects and activities led by women. We had created a few projects in the ones we seek to understand gender balance, hostile situations and the need or not of CoC in OSM. We found that many contributors perceive the lack of gender equality but do not see the necessity to shift the numbers nor increase the debate because they don’t believe in mapping as a sociopolitical practice and instead believe in maps as neutral and have nothing to do with a contributors’ gender condition.

In this talk we want to share the projects we had developed to integrate more women in the mapping community, show some of the results that the initiatives created are helping to encourage more female mappers to lead projects and share knowledge among everyone.