Introduction:
In China, it is illegal to find the sex of baby during pregnancy because some people choose
abortion when it is a girl. As a woman from China, I struggled with my gender when I was
younger because I’ve seen families pay surrogates to have a boy even though they already have three daughters of their own. At the same time, I was fortunate to witness the change in me culture where babies of both sex are treated more equally during pregnancy and after they were born. I want to see if the population (percentage) of female new born is related to the country’s gender equality in any kind of way. Furthermore, considering that more and more countries are facing the challenge of aging population, I hope this set of data could help me explore more on this aspect as well.
Inspiration:
inspiration 1:
I like map because it is easy to get the idea of the percentages and the overall trend of each group at first glance. Moreover, it provides an opportunity for viewers to explore all of the data by hovering over each dot. It avoids the visual chaos caused by handful of numbers and information.
Inspiration 2:
I enjoyed this bar chart with colors because it is clean. It is easy to compare each type.
Materials:
At first, I used Refine to clean up the data by converting years from columns into rows and
separating complex information in one column. Then I used excel to delete continents and only left countries. At last, I used Tableau to filter the data set and make the graph.
Methods/Process:
The first challenge I had is the large data set from UN. After cleaning up and converting the data, I still had more than 60,000 rows. There are more than 50 countries, more than 20 age groups and the time range of 100 years in my data set. I believe such data would not only overwhelm me but also the viewers. In order to effectively communicate my point, I decided to filter the data. I looked up articles “The 10 Worst Countries for Gender Equality”
published by USNEWS in 2019 and the Global Gender Gap Report. Also in consideration of areas and population, I chose to keep a range of countries: three countries from top 20 best countries for women (Philippine, South Africa, Canada);Two countries/Area in the middle (China and Hongkong). I’m aware Hongkong is part of China, however, I still perceive these two with different enough cultures in gender and sex to separate them. Four countries from bottom 20 countries for women (India, Indonesia, Jordan, Iraq)
For age groups, I chose to keep the age group until 19.
For years, I chose to keep the range from 1990 to 2010. Initially, I attempted to keep only 10
years of range but the change did not seem significant enough to predict a trend. Thus I kept 20 years.
The first challenge i had is the huge population difference. China and India had a much bigger population to start with than other countries. It caused the unit to be huge and it was very hard to see the trends of the countries with smaller populations. Therefore, I divided the data into multiple small graphs using countries, then I convert the population numbers into percentage across pane (of each country) to gain a relatively comparable graph.
I used heatmap with different colors to represent different age group in the end. I think it provides a clear way for people to see the percentages and the trend within each country.
Results and Reflection:
link:https://public.tableau.com/profile/xueping.wu#!/vizhome/femalepopulation/Sheet1?publish=yes
link:https://public.tableau.com/views/femalepopulation/Sheet2?:embed=y&:display_count=yes&publish=yes
The countries with higher rank gender equality has a relatively stable increase in young women population. The countries in the middle such as China and Hong Kong (even through these two may not speak for the majority because of their special policy) has a decreasing rate in young women population. The countries with lower ranked gender equality has a faster growing women population. Honestly, the graph shows the opposite of my initial guess. The similar trends of grouped countries indicate there is some kind of relationship between the female new born and the gender equality rank: the countries with lower ranked gender equality has a much faster growth rate compare to other countries.
Therefore, I researched a little bit more.
Here are a few factors to keep in mind while viewing the graph:
- China launched its one-child policy in 1979 and it was not relaxed until 2015.
- Iraq’s overall population has been rising at a fast speed since 2013 because of large family base (4 children each family) and improved public health system.
- Hong Kong has one of the lowest fertility rate in the world due to its high expense in housing and living.
If there’s a chance for following research, I hope to compare the female population growth with the male population growth of each country. Also I want to integrating motions of change per year into the graph like the example below.
