The Design of Information

I’m adding a few more graph samples from the Gender Diversity study, pertinent to an interesting discussion of appropriate line graph scales on Alberto Cairo’s The Functional Art blog and a discussion of slopegraphs on Andy Kirk’s Visualising Data blog.

For the Gender Diversity study, we chose to use a 50% maximum for the scale of the line graphs, with the idea that 50% represents parity. I suppose that sends the subtle message that parity is what we are shooting for, so you can visually see how far the line is from parity. For female representation at the largest U.S. companies, those lines are mostly still quite far below the 50% line, which makes it a little difficult to get a good sense of recent change. For some of the data, we included the average number of women in a position over time, using a scale which comes closer to Cleveland’s 45 degree optimum

I think I was first introduced to slopegraphs in Alberto Cairo’s book, The Functional Art (a book I recommend to anyone wanting to do a better job of presenting data). We used them to show the change of women in key positions from the beginning to the end of the survey period. “GC” is for General Counsel – the other abbreviations are probably more familiar.