The streets named after women in Romania’s 41 county seats

Who the women on the plates are#

The 344 streets carry 171 women’s names. The most common is Ana Ipătescu, with 33 streets, followed by Ecaterina Teodoroiu (26) and Ecaterina Varga (15).

It is often said that a woman reaches a street plate mostly as a queen, a saint or a heroine. Counted by streets, that holds: queens, princesses and rulers’ wives have 17% of the women’s streets, saints 5%, heroines and martyrs 29%; together, 51%. Counted by women, the same three groups are only 29%: a few queens and heroines have very many streets, while many writers, actresses and teachers have one each. Doctors, engineers, aviators and scientists have 7% of the streets.

More alleys, almost no boulevards#

Boulevards, avenues and highways belong almost entirely to men: of 210 named after a person, 6 are named after a woman. On alleys, lanes and cul-de-sacs the women’s share is 8.0%.

13% of the women’s streets are alleys, lanes or cul-de-sacs; of the men’s, 7%.

But compared with streets of the same type in the same city (alley with alley, street with street), a woman’s street is not measurably shorter. Each piece of a woman’s street was ranked by length among the pieces of person-named streets of the same type in its city; on average they sit at the 48th percentile (50 would be exactly in the middle). Ignoring street type, it would be the 47th. Part of the gap comes from women having alleys more often; what is left is too small to tell apart from chance (p = 0.24).

The centre is the most male part of town#

The natural guess: women’s streets lie more often at the edge. The data support it, but weakly, and not everywhere.

In the most central part of the cities, 3.4% of the person-named streets are women’s. On the outskirts, 7.1%. Ranked the same way by distance from the centre, the women’s streets sit on average at the 53rd percentile (p = 0.03): a little further out, not much. Of the 25 cities with at least five streets named after women, 16 have a higher women’s share in their outer half (p = 0.23). The tendency is weak, and Bucharest does not follow it: there the women’s share is about the same in the centre (5.2%) as in the districts 2 to 5 km out (5.6%), and lower beyond (3.2%).

Women with few streets, or none#

The search covered all of Romania, not only the 41 cities: every named street in OpenStreetMap, in every commune, and the official 2016 street register. Only streets with a name on the map are counted.

• Ștefania Mărăcineanu

  1882–1944

  Physicist. She worked with Marie Curie in Paris and studied polonium. She held that induced radioactivity, for which Irène Joliot-Curie won the Nobel Prize, grew out of her own work. There is no street for her in the 2016 official register either. The name Mărăcineanu is on 41 streets; 40 of them name Captain Valter Mărăcineanu, killed in 1877 in the War of Independence.

  On the map of Romania: no street.

• Sarmiza Bilcescu

  1867–1935

  The first woman to earn a doctorate in law from the Faculty of Law in Paris, and Romania’s first woman lawyer.

  On the map of Romania: one street, in Timișoara.

• Elisa Leonida Zamfirescu

  1887–1973

  Engineer, one of the first women anywhere with an engineering degree, earned in Berlin. She ran a hospital in the First World War.

  On the map of Romania: 3 streets (București, Galați, Timișoara).

• Sofia Ionescu-Ogrezeanu

  1920–2008

  Neurosurgeon, possibly the first woman neurosurgeon in the world.

  On the map of Romania: one street, in Timișoara.

• Elena Caragiani-Stoenescu

  1887–1929

  Romania’s first woman aviator. Refused a licence at home, she earned one in France, among the first 15 women pilots in the world.

  On the map of Romania: 2 streets (București, Vărlezi).

• Ana Aslan

  1897–1988

  Gerontologist and academician; she ran the National Institute of Geriatrics and Gerontology until 1988.

  On the map of Romania: 10 streets (Alba Iulia, Bistrița, Brăila and others).

• Smaranda Brăescu

  1897–1948

  Aviator and parachutist, world record holder for parachute jumps. Sentenced in absentia by the communist regime, she lived in hiding until her death.

  On the map of Romania: 10 streets (Bistrița, Buciumeni, București and others).

How it was counted, and how sure it is#

What was counted

Every named street inside the administrative limits of the 41 county seats, from the OpenStreetMap extract of Romania of 23 October 2026. Bucharest is also the official seat of Ilfov County, so the 41 county seats are 40 cities plus the capital. A “street” is every segment with the same type and the same name in one city (Strada Veronica Micle and Intrarea Veronica Micle are two streets); the type word (Strada, Aleea, Bulevardul) was removed only to find the person. For length and distance, a name used in two different districts was split into its separate pieces.

Matching went in steps: Wikidata (names and aliases), titles that carry a gender (Queen, Lady, Saint, Prince), then given names. Then the names were checked one by one. Each of the 171 women’s names was looked up in sources: 143 were identified, with the source in the street’s card; for the other 28 a published source is missing or the person remains unidentified (mostly small Bucharest streets carrying only a first and last name, or a title with no name, such as “Domniței”). The Caceu sisters, killed in Timișoara in 1989, share one street and are counted once. The 502 names still unresolved were labelled one by one, and 784 more names that could hide a woman (rare given names, inverted order, Hungarian names) were re-read.

The 4.3% is a share of the streets named after a person whose gender is known (7,929). Left out are 87 streets named after an unidentified person, pairs (Saints Constantine and Helen) and legendary figures. If all 87 were women, the share would rise to 5.4%.

How sure it is: three independent checks

A blind sample. Before any classification, 1,000 streets were drawn at random and classed separately, twice over, without access to the method. That classing found 15 women among 341 person-named streets (4.4%); on the same streets the method found 12 of 325 (3.7%). It found 12 of the 15 women and invented none: the error is −0.7 percentage points (95% interval −1.8 to +0.2), so if the figure here is wrong, it is more likely too low. Two of the missed women have been corrected; the third is a street called only “Maria”, which stays among the streets with a first name alone whose person could not be identified. The sample was kept out of the later checks, so the published data are better checked than the sample.

Mapping Diversity. The European project by EDJNet and OBC Transeuropa checked Bucharest by hand, street by street: 5.6% (86 of 1,549). Here Bucharest comes out at 5.0%. Nearly all the gap is definitions: Mapping Diversity counts goddesses, fairy-tale heroines and mixed pairs as women; under the same rules the figure here would be 5.4%. For Sibiu: 2.0% there, 2.4% here. Other counts for Bucharest gave 5.9% (ProTV, 2025, 94 of 1,581) and 3.5% (Grünberg and Neaga, 2015), from different lists and years.

The official 2016 register. The Ministry of Finance street lists for the same 41 cities give 4.1% women. Matching names automatically, 27% of the register’s streets named after women and 36% of those named after men have no counterpart in OpenStreetMap (renamed since 2016, spelled differently, or missing from the map). After manual matching, 47 of the register’s 323 women’s streets have no match today. Nothing in the name matching suggests OpenStreetMap loses women’s streets more often than men’s.

Length and distance

Length is the mapped road length of each piece of street; distance is the length-weighted mean distance from the city’s place point in OpenStreetMap. Each woman’s street is compared with the person-named streets of the same type in the same city; the test shuffles the gender labels 10,000 times within each group.

What this cannot tell

The map does not know when a street got its name. OpenStreetMap is made by volunteers: a street without a name on the map is missing from the count. A name on a plate says neither who chose it nor why.

Sources#

1. Streets: OpenStreetMap, the Romania extract from Geofabrik of 23 October 2026, ODbL. City limits: administrative boundaries in the same extract.
2. People: Wikidata (CC0) for gender and identity; every woman checked separately, with her source in the street’s card.
3. Official street lists: Ministry of Finance nomenclatures of 16 September 2016 on data.gov.ro (OGL-ROU-1.0).
4. Independent comparison: Mapping Diversity (EDJNet and OBC Transeuropa), Bucharest and Sibiu, checked by hand street by street.
5. Earlier work: Felecan and Felecan, “Feminine names in current Romanian hodonymy”, Onomastica 65 (2021); Gutiérrez-Mora and Oto-Peralías, “Gendered cities” (Spain); Rusu, “Gendering Urban Namescapes” (Sibiu).