Rise of The Girl Boss
A visual tour of women’s journey from generations past and present.
Feminism — the belief in the political, economic, and cultural equality of women — has roots in the earliest eras of human civilization. It is typically separated into three waves and an emerging fourth wave. The history of feminism is long and fascinating; from the “right to vote” to the #MeToo movement, we have come a long way. For my data visualization project, I wanted to visualize this journey of feminism over various generations.
Goal
We are far from a gender-equal society but for this project, I wanted to visualize the journey we’ve covered so far and the journey we have yet to travel. I aimed to visually tell a story coupled with interactive visualizations to help the user understand the journey and be able to back the story up with data. Here’s the result: Rise of The Girl Boss
Let’s unite and work together for a more equal world.
We owe it to the next generations and to ourselves to strive for a world where women have a voice, choice, and agency and enjoy the same rights as men.
Let’s now take a look into the process of how I worked to create this project.
Story Development
I started with researching the history and the currently available resources to increase my understanding of the domain and also to understand this story of feminism. I looked at papers to get a detailed understanding of the growth of women and inequalities that still exist, each with a different set of factors and a different point of view that they wanted to communicate. Searching through various papers, blog posts, and datasets I finally wrote down the flow of the story that I wanted to present to the readers:
Sketching
From the storyline, I drew some sketches on what could be visualized for each of the main components of the story. The final implementation also makes use of animations and web page scroll to make the story as compelling and engaging as possible.
The story is broken down into 4 visualizations:
- A world map aiming to show the percentage share of women in total labor force employment summarized over countries.
2. A line chart illustrating the share of women in the labor force in the United States over the years. It aims to show the story of the trend in labor force participation by women over the four waves and thus is supplemented with additional reading to convey the history over the highlighted years.
3. A line chart for top 10 occupations employing women and their trends over the years.
4. A heatmap for gender inequality index over all the countries and over the years.
Implementation
After having a storyline and a basic idea of how the visualizations will look like I moved to the stage where I felt confident enough to start the implementation of the project.
Data: The story contains various visualizations formed with the help of various datasets. Before using these datasets to generate visualizations in Tableau, I used Microsoft Excel as well as Python Pandas to clean and reformat these datasets.
Tableau: After finding datasets for each part of the story and sketching out the designs for them I started implementing the visualizations in Tableau with the necessary filters and styling. After getting through the learning curve of Tableau I started creating Tableau stories, although I did not feel the impact that I wanted my stories to have with it.
So then I started with creating a web page to showcase these visualizations created in Tableau and supplement them with reading to form a more cohesive and well-knit story.
User Evaluation
After conducting user evaluations with 3 users — with different levels of familiarity with visualizations — I found that I still needed to work on storytelling. The visualizations and the text helped them understand the story from a broad level but the details of color, source, labels, headings, the structure of the page, and the limitations (if any) of the visualization were the elements that hindered the users' ability to comprehensively understand the story. Thus, during my next iterations, these were the things I focussed the most on improving upon.
Final Visualization
Improving upon the learnings and feedback from the user evaluations sessions and also implementing “scrollytelling” on the web page I moved to a more well-presented and well-knit story than my previous iterations.
Here is the link for the final implementation: Final Visualization of “Rise of The Girl Boss”
“Scrollytelling” was a term first coined to describe online longform stories characterised by audio, video and animation effects triggered by simply scrolling the page.
Limitations and Future Work
There are various key factors that affect gender inequality among various cultures and ideologies. Some of the key topics relevant to this context like family benefits public spending, Gender Wage Gap by Occupation, What percentage of the public approves of working wives, educational levels, marriage rates, birth rates, etc. should be added to provide a more in-depth view to the audience.
A more in-depth story touching upon various factors will then help create a more holistic understanding of our journey throughout and also help gain insight into what obstacles we have yet to overcome.
References:
- A Century of Change: the U.S. Labor Force, 1950–2050. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/ art2full.pdf.
- Women in the labor force: a databook. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/womens-databook/ 2020/home.htm.
- Feminism. https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/feminism-womens-history.
- Four waves of feminism. https://www.pacificu.edu/magazine/four-waves-feminism.
- Women in the workforce before, during, and after the great recession. https://www.bls. gov/spotlight/2017/women-in-the-workforce-before-during-and-after-the-great-recession/pdf/ women-in-the-workforce-before-during-and-after-the-great-recession.pdf.
- Women’s employment. https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply.
- Claudia Goldin. The quiet revolution that transformed women’s employment, education, and family. Working Paper 11953, National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2006.
- Classified ad 15 — no title. (1947, oct 26). new york times (1923-) retrieved from. https: //www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/classified-ad-15-no-title/docview/108053183/se-2? accountid=14696.
- Barrow,lisaandbutcher,kristinfrancesandandersongodwin,katharine,womenandthephillips curve: Do women’s and men’s labor market outcomes differentially affect real wage growth and inflation? (november 2003).
- Working women: What determines female labor force participation? https://ourworldindata.org/ women-in-the-labor-force-determinants.
- What’s your pay gap? http://graphics.wsj.com/gender-pay-gap/.
