There are more streets named after priests, friars, bishops, popes and other clergymen than there are named after women, a new study has found.

The stark gender imbalance stretches all the way to the heavens, because male saints also largely outnumber female saints on the plaques of Malta’s 7,500 streets.

There is some solace for women, however, as the saint with the most streets named after them is a woman – the Virgin Mary.

This is part of what has been keeping Dr Yanika Borg very busy over the past few months.

Through geospatial analysis, web scraping and data analysis, the 34-year-old Maltese data analytics expert based in the UK found there are over 7,500 streets in Malta with more than 6,500 different street names, and that over 3,000 of them are named after someone.

She then pieced the data together from information gathered from the University of Malta library, Times of Malta and from the internet to uncover the patterns behind those plaque names.

In the study, titled What’s in a name? A brief look at gender diversity in the street names of Malta, Borg highlights a stark gender imbalance.

Of all the streets named after people, only 12 per cent are named after women.

“More are named for male clergy (popes, archpriests, bishops but mostly priests ‒ ‘Dun’) than for women,” she said.

There are a few women who have been notably celebrated in street names, such as in Vittoriosa, where there is a famous street named after soprano Hilda Tabone, who sang opera in Malta and in Paris in the 1960s, and a street in Sliema named after Russian princess and ballerina Nathalie Poutiatin Tabone, who found shelter in Malta after fleeing the uprising of the Bolsheviks in the late 1910s.

But far more men are acknowledged and commemorated in street names.

Men preferred even in heaven

Moreover, more than a quarter (28%) of Maltese streets named after people are named after saints, Borg found. And again, male saints “still take the centre stage here”.

It is a female saint, however, that appears on most plaques. Through her various religious titles – such as Santa Marija, l-Assunta, il-Bambina and il- Vitorja – the Madonna has the most streets named after her.

“St Catherine follows at a very distant second (she is the second most popular lady saint, 12th most popular overall),” Borg said in her study.

“St Paul is the most popular male saint, but even he doesn’t hold a candle to the Madonna’s mighty presence.”

After the Virgin Mary, St Paul has the second highest number of streets named after him, followed by St Joseph and St John.

“Jesus places in a distant 10th position,” Borg found.

What about politicians?

The study also found only seven per cent of streets are named after politicians.

“Here, once again, it’s a whirlwind of men, with the few Maltese women involved in politics who are commemorated via street names being Agatha Barbara (first woman president), Evelyn Bonaci (a member of parliament in the 1960s and 1970s), Maggie Moran (president of the women’s group in the Labour Party) and Mabel Strickland (a member of parliament in the 1950s and 1960s and a founder of The Times of Malta).”

Other women do feature in a handful of streets, the study found, but only by virtue of being related to a male politician. Among them, Dom Mintoff’s mother and wife – Ċetta Mintoff and Moyra Mintoff.

“I find it uncomfortable that these women are being defined by their relation to a man, but in my research I wasn’t able to find anything else about them,” Borg noted.

Artists, poets and statue-makers

The study also found there are more streets named after painters, sculptors, actors, playwrights, poets, musicians, band conductors and statue-makers than there are streets named after politicians.

Again, women barely feature here.

“They make up less than 10 per cent of streets named after cultural figures.”

Borg has a PhD in synthetic biology from University College London and was part of a team of women who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in 2019 with the international, not-for-profit organisation eXXpedition to gather data on microplastics in the ocean.

The details about the study on street names, as well as the raw data, can be found on her newly-launched website thedataknitters.com where she colourfully – and often comically – illustrates her findings cleverly, concisely and simply through pictures, maps, tables and graphs.