Week 39: Visualizing Equality

Original visualization | Data set on data.world | Viz Review Webinar

A message of thanks from Equal Measures 2030 for the impact you all have made:

EM2030 is all about making data more compelling, accessible and available to gender equality champions and through their data visualizations, the Makeover Monday community is helping us to achieve just that. Through their support, skills, enthusiasm and engagement, the data community helped us to bring the voices, insights and opinions of more than 600 gender equality advocates to life in a more humanized and compelling way. Through their work, we presented these key advocates survey findings to other gender equality champions, private sector, and policymakers during our side-event at the UN General Assembly. We hope to continue working together with the Makeover Monday community, as we bring together data users, data producers and data communicators to help #VisualizeEquality and bring key issues impacting girls and women to the forefront and into the spotlight.

This was our second collaboration with them this year, the previous analyzed how well informed policy makers across different countries are about five particular issues relating to women and girls. The focus for this collaboration was on gender equality. Well done everyone!

LESSON 1: GO EASY ON THE COLORS

Eva provided the corporate colors for Equal Measures 2030 on data.world, a palette of four colors. It was great to see so many people incorporating the colors into their work. However, it’s important to not go overboard with the colors and to not mix their meaning. As an example, consider this viz from Danny Bradley that we reviewed during Viz Review:

We gave Danny the following feedback about his use of color:

Green and purple have two different meanings in the top two chart
Pink has three different meanings
What do the colors of the text mean?
Simplify

Danny is really good at iterating on feedback. Remember, the feedback is our opinion, not gospel; do with it what you like, but we do like to see people iterating and showing their before and after. Here’s how Danny’s viz looked after his iterations:

What a difference! Color is now only used when it means something. The text is now black instead of various colors. Everything has been simplified, allowing the data to communicate without competing for attention. Well done Danny!

LESSON 2: VISUALIZING LIKERT SCALES

A Likert scale, sometimes referred to as a rating scale, measures levels of agreement or disagreement on a topic, typically on a four or five point scale.

The best resource I know of for tips on visualizing survey data is from Steve Wexler’s website. This is my absolute go-to resource when I need ideas or tips for how to work with notoriously difficult survey data. Thanks Steve for keeping up this page!

There were so many fantastic uses of Likert scales this week, some using a divergent scale to lean positively or negatively. Others used a simple stacked bar. Some included a number inside a circle for the overall rating. I was amazed at the number of fantastic Likert scale vizzes this week. Here are a few: