Makeover Monday week 39, 2018: Visualizing Equality

Collaborations for Makeover Monday mean that we partner with a non-profit organization to help them crowd-source visualizations that support their mission and help them create awareness through data and analysis.This week we're collaborating with Equal Measures 2030, an initiative by the UN to monitor progress being made (or not) to address gender equality issues with the mission to support global equality goals that leave no girl or woman behind by 2030.Survey data is always challenging but supporting a great cause and a team of passionate people is far more important than personal 'data preferences', so let's get into this week's challenge.

What works well:

• Bright, bold colors that draw my attention
• Descriptive chart titles that include the units (percentages)
• Notes that specify mutiple answers were possible, this explains why the sum can be greater than 100%
• Including the number of respondents to show sample sizes

What could be improved:

• Some colors from Figure 3 are repeated in Figure 4 but have a different meaning in the second chart, this is confusing
• While these charts are part of a larger report which provides context, they are not easy to understand without that context. It would be great to have an ingraphic style visualization which brings in further details about and background to the survey conducted
• So what? I am missing some action items here and specific steps. The data shows how national advocates responded to the survey but there is no indication of the consequences. If people identify something as a priority topic, does this mean anything will get done?

What I did:

• I decided to add more context into the actual viz, while focusing on the following key outcomes:
  • The priorities according to gender advocates
  • The possible reasons for data gaps relating to gender equality data
• I was pleased to see that the top priority across the board is to address gender-based violence. Lately I have spend a lot of time going through the conversation around the #MeToo campaign and more recently #WhyIDidntReport. A collection of heart breaking stories if ever I saw one. While I have experienced every emotion from anger, rage, fury, sadness and complete despair, I am also hopeful that something has started. It feels like women across the world are finding strength in numbers and consolation in each others' trust and support.There is a huge amount of work to do, but finally people are talking about it. Women are speaking up, men are starting to realize how massive the problem is and that literally every woman is affected. If you don't believe me, then please find a woman you know who has never been harrassed, made uncomfortable, who has never felt unsafe or worse, experienced sexual violence.
• It's time for all of this to stop and seeing through this week's #MakeoverMonday collaboration with Equal Measures 2030 that gender advocates around the world see this as the biggest threat to gender equality is a step in the right direction.

Here is my viz: