Warming Towards Women Leaders

We are going to start this week off with a nice small multiple graphic that explores the reducing resistance to women in positions of leadership in Arab countries. The graphic comes from a BBC article published last week.

A lot of positive negative movement.

These kinds of graphics allow a reader to quickly compare the trajectory of a thing between a start and an endpoint. The drawback is it can obscure any curious or interesting trends in the midpoints. For example, with Libya, is its flat trajectory always been flat? You could imagine a steep fall off but then rapid climb back up. That would be a story worth telling, but a story obscured by this type of graphic.

I do think the graphic could use a few tweaks to help improve the data clarity. The biggest change? I would work to improve the vertical scale, i.e. stretch each chart taller. Since we care about the drop in opposition to women leaders, let’s emphasise that part of the graphic. There could be space constraints for the graphic, but that said, it looks like some of the spacing between chart header and chart could be reduced. And I think for most of the charts except for the first, the year range could be added as a data definition to the graphic and removed from each chart. Similar to how every row only once uses the vertical axis labels.

Another way this could be done is by reducing the horizontal width of each chart in an attempt to squeeze the nine from three rows down to two. That would mean two additional chart positions per row. Tight fit? Probably, but there is also some extraneous space to the right and left of each chart and a large gap between the charts themselves. This all appears to be due to those aforementioned x-axis labels. An additional benefit to reducing the horizontal dimensions of each chart is it increases the vertical depth of the chart as each line’s slope, its rise over run, sees its horizontal distance shrink.

Overall this is a really smart graphic that works well, but with a few extra tweaks could take it to the next level.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

Tracking the Women Running for Office

Yesterday we talked about a static graphic from the New York Times that ran front and centre on the, well, front page. Whilst writing the piece, I recalled a piece from Politico that I have been lazily following, as in I bookmarked to write about another time. And suddenly today seemed as good as any other day.

After all, this piece also is about women running for Congress, and a bit more widely it also looks at gubernatorial races. It tracks the women candidates through the primary season. The reason I was holding off? Well, we are at the beginning of the primary season and as the Sankey diagram in the screenshot below shows, we just don’t have much data yet. And charts with “Wait, we promise we’ll have more” lack the visual impact and interest of those that are full of hundreds of data points.

Still too many unknowns. But at least these are known unknowns…
Still too many unknowns. But at least these are known unknowns…

But we should still look at it—and who knows, maybe late this summer or early autumn I will circle back to it. After all, today is primary day in Pennsylvania. (Note: Pennsylvania is a closed primary state, which means you have to belong to the political party to vote for its candidates.) So this tool is super useful looking ahead, because it also shows the slate of women running for positions.

Aside from just the number of women running, today's primaries will be fascinating because of the whole redistricting thing
Aside from just the number of women running, today’s primaries will be fascinating because of the whole redistricting thing

I really like the piece, but as I said above, I will want to circle back to it later this year to see it with more data collected.

Credit for the piece goes to Sarah Frostenson.