Most of the world wasn't designed with women in mind. HerMap exists to make it easier to find the businesses that got it right.
From the height of a subway handrail to the shape of a car seat to how safe it feels to walk into a business you've never been to before — most of the world wasn't designed with women in mind. Most women learn to navigate around this the hard way: years of trial, error, and word-of-mouth from people they trust. That knowledge doesn't travel with you when you move to a new city, or when you're new to a neighborhood.
HerMap exists to make that knowledge findable — a place to discover and support local businesses that are genuinely safe, accessible, and welcoming, verified by real people, not assumed from a star rating.
HerMap's founder, Fan Yang, spent years researching transportation and building design — and kept running into the same pattern: seatbelts, headrests, and crash-test dummies built around average male dimensions; public transit designed for a "default" rider who wasn't her. Women are still more likely to be seriously injured in car crashes than men, in part because the safety equipment was never designed with their bodies in mind.
The more Fan looked, the more the same story kept repeating — in public space, in workplace design, in how businesses get recommended to strangers. Most women already know which businesses feel safe and welcoming — but that knowledge lives in group chats and word-of-mouth, not anywhere searchable. Existing review platforms rate on stars and sentiment, not on the specific things that actually make a place feel safe or accessible.
So she built the thing she wished existed: a directory where "verified" means someone actually checked — not an algorithm, not a paid placement, an actual person confirming a business really has the step-free entrance, the safe parking, the welcoming space it claims to have.
"If the world won't redesign itself for us, we'll build our own guide to the places that understand."
A "HerMap Verified" badge means someone on the HerMap team actually confirmed it in person — not an algorithm, and not a paid placement.
We only publish what a business tells us or what their own website already states. No borrowed reviews, no invented details.
HerMap exists because the tools to find genuinely welcoming, accessible places didn't exist yet.
Beyond listing businesses, HerMap wants "designed with everyone in mind" to be the default, not the exception.