"Gendered" Apartments

Overview

Walking down any street in Mumbai, you're likely to pass by Vijay, Rajshree, Puja, or Ankur. But these aren't people--they're apartment names!

This mini-project for the 30-Day Map challenge on Twitter sought to answer the question: When a developer names a building, do they favor one gender over another?

Methodology

I scraped a list of building names in Mumbai and ran them through a names classifier engine, and aggregated the building points to area hexagons to help the user identify patterns.

Conclusions

My personal hypothesis was that we would see more female names based on my anecdotal on-ground observations. However, it seems that developers have a preference for male names. For future studies, it would be interesting to add variables like the date of construction or assessed value or measure individual developer biases. Also, the names classifier engine's data output may need to be curated further for accuracy.

‍