"Although women have always been part of the mapping landscape, their contributions to cartography have long been overlooked. Mapmaking has traditionally featured men, from Mercator's projection of the world in the 1500s to land surveyors such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson mapping property in the 1700s, to Roger Tomlinson's development of geographic information systems in the 1960s."
"Women have long been essential to how people see and understand the world. The concept of Mother Earth or Mother Nature as the center of the universe and source of all life spans Indigenous cultures around the globe. In the 20th century, the scientific community and environmental activists adopted the term Gaia - the Greek goddess personifying the Earth, the mother of all deities - to reflect the notion of the Earth as a living system. Gaia is represented as female and understood as a guiding force in maintaining the atmosphere, oceans and climate."
Women have always participated in mapmaking, yet their contributions were frequently overlooked while men dominated visible roles in mapping and surveying. Historical examples include Mercator's projection, 18th-century land surveyors, and mid-20th-century GIS pioneers, reflecting a male-dominated cartographic field. The rise of geographic information systems and related technologies over the past five decades has broadened education, employment and research opportunities, making mapmaking more accessible to women. Cultural representations have long gendered the land as female through concepts like Mother Earth and Gaia, and nationalism reshaped gendered meanings of fatherland and motherland, with maps historically using female forms to portray regions.
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