Revealing the Global Realities of Gender Equality in New Ways

Graphicacy overhauls the World Bank Group’s Gender Data Portal to deliver improved organization, navigation, and data-driven storytelling power.

The World Bank Group works in every major area of development to reduce poverty and increase shared prosperity around the globe. Achieving these objectives requires a concentrated effort to advance gender equality — one of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

To this end, the World Bank’s Development Data and Gender Groups maintain one of the largest collections of sex-disaggregated specific data focused on women’s issues and factors such as health, education, employment, and domestic violence. This Gender Data Portal provides information essential to shaping impactful policies, improving project design, identifying data gaps, and drawing attention to urgent problems.

In 2021, rather than simply updating the Portal, the Gender and Data Groups enlisted the data visualization expertise of Graphicacy to dramatically overhaul the entire user experience and make the full breadth of critical information easier to navigate and understand for a much broader audience.

Sizable improvements

Before reimagining the Portal, Graphicacy’s engineers and designers had to get a firm handle on the raw material. “The volume of data available was truly extraordinary,” Graphicacy Creative Director Jeffrey Osborn said. “Every step of the way, we collaborated with the Gender and Data Groups on what information to prioritize for users and which visualizations made the most sense for each data set.”

Graphicacy’s nearly year-long work involved several elements, including a structural revamp and a comprehensive user experience redesign, which ultimately enabled the data’s powerful stories to emerge like never before.

The navigation

The Gender Data Portal features approximately 1,000 pages, including one each for more than 200 countries. Graphicacy and the Gender and Data Groups streamlined the organization of the content around 14 main topics (such as assets, entrepreneurship, education, employment) with over 200 indicator groups comprising nearly 1,000 different indicators.

Graphicacy replaced the Portal’s one-dimensional dashboards with a home page presenting several options for exploring data. Clicking a topic card leads to a richer topic profile with visualizations of key indicators, a list of all indicators within that topic, and links to related content beyond the Portal.

Users can also choose country profiles to see snapshots of gender data with visualized indicators across all topics. Graphicacy built charts showing how a selected country compares to its corresponding region, income group, or the world. Simple prompts allow users to move easily across sections and see comparative data — a task that previously required multiple clicks.

“We’re working with a similar amount of data here as the previous version of the Portal,” said Eduardo Velez, Lead Data Visualization Engineer at Graphicacy. “The big difference is that users can see more while doing less. They have more intuitive ways to discover larger sets of data.”

For added simplicity, the Portal offers a high-level content overview and a Help section with tips for navigating, accessing, and using the data most effectively.

The stories

Data on its own may work for economists and data specialists, but reaching a broader audience requires context. Graphicacy designed the new Portal to emphasize contextual storytelling. Brief paragraphs of text, generated by an algorithm, now accompany many of the interactive visualizations.

“The narrative elements bring the data points to life and connect the dots for users,” Eduardo said. “They extract the main messages from the data and point to important gaps and trends in gender equality.”

In addition, a new blog on the Portal features stories from diverse contributors on gender issues ranging from the labor force and societal norms to violence and HIV rates.

The look

To immediately establish a more approachable tone, Graphicacy incorporated a colorful palette and friendlier typography into the overall Portal design. Large text callouts and color-coded text and charts help make the Portal more welcoming to users of all backgrounds.

Graphicacy’s designers chose a few different data visualization styles for simple scanning and quick comprehension, including maps, line charts, bar charts, and scatterplot graphs.

Making an impact with the data

The Portal is a treasure trove of information, with key statistics highlighting the gender disparities that still exist throughout the world. From the scant number of women who hold seats in national parliaments (only 25% worldwide) to the disturbing percentage of women who experience sexual violence (as high as 57% in certain countries), much work remains to create gender parity.

With a more accessible Portal, the World Bank’s Gender and Data Groups aims to attract researchers, advocates, journalists, and others who will give the data a life of its own. The greater the exposure, the greater the chance gender data will reach policymakers and others in position to take action.

Graphicacy added capabilities for users to download full datasets, create shareable PDFs, and customize visualization colors and fonts for their own presentations and publications. The Gender and Data Groups also plans to conduct workshops for various audiences to help them better understand how to use the data for good in the context of their work.

The Gender and Data Groups leadership team feels confident the new Portal will soon become the go-to source for gender data on two fronts: tracking the need for parity around the world and showing where gaps in data remain.

“We’re extremely proud to have been involved with a project of this scale that affects the lives and futures of so many people worldwide,” said Graphicacy Managing Director Josh Nerpel.