Introduction

Gender equality is a human right, but our world faces a persistent gap in access to opportunities and decision-making power for women and men. Globally, women have fewer opportunities for economic participation than men, less access to basic and higher education, greater health and safety risks, and less political representation.

Women’s participation in parliaments is a key aspect of women’s opportunities in political and public life and is therefore linked to women’s empowerment. A stronger presence of women in parliament allows new concerns to be highlighted on political agendas, and new priorities to be put into practice through the adoption and implementation of policies and laws.

In this visualization, the percentage of Seats held by women in national parliament are examed to assess the facts and figures of all national woman parliamentarians.

Discussion

The initial investigation into this data looked into the 100 Years of Women in the House of Commons (Fig 1.1). In that visualization, they follow the stories of women in the House of Commons through data and identify their contributions with the help of machine learning. It is really an interactive and intuitive data visualization with a smooth working flow. With the inspiration of this data, I looked into the near history of Women in the House of Commons after 1990 (Fig1.2) and explored the data of seats held by women in national parliament. After adding the data in time order, the pattern of the world ’s women’s seats in national parliament became clear and certain countries data stood out.

Materials

UNData –  an internet-based data service which brings UN statistical databases within easy reach of users through a single entry point

Microsoft Excel – spreadsheet software used to explore data and make a few basic edits

Tableau – free software to create interactive data visualizations to be shared in both public and private settings

Methods

Starting with an investigation into the original data set of  Seats held by women in national parliament, there are data of not only each country but also each region. I mainly want to explore the percentage and the pattern of each country so I cleaned up the dataset and only leave the data of each country for future visualization.  

After the data was clean and ready for analysis, it was imported into Tableau, while visualizing the data, I found out that from 1990 to 2005, not all the data are collected for each country, so to visualize the total from 1990 to 2005 would not be meaningful. However, visualizing the data in strip plots can be a really effective way to show individual measurements for each country along a continuous variable of the pattern(Fig 2.1).  From 2014 to 2018, the data is complete for each country from 2014 to 2018, so a bar chart can clearly show the order of the percentage of each country and visualize the percentage of women in national parliament for each country with a clear label of each country(Fig 2.4). Further visualization also includes a map(Fig 2.3) of the world with each year in a different page and a line graph(Fig 2.2) to show the pattern top 5 countries over time.

Results and interpretation

From the visualization results of the whole world (Fig 2.3) and the top 5 countries of the Seats held by women in national parliament(Fig 2.2), it clearly shows that although the international community has supported and promoted women’s participation in political decision-making structures for several decades, improvement in women’s access to parliament has been slow.

Result:

https://public.tableau.com/profile/ran.yu#!/vizhome/Seatsheldbywomeninnationalparliament/Dashboard1

Globally, there are 29 States in which women account for less than 10 percent of parliamentarians in single or lower houses (Fig 2.4), as of November 2018, including 4 chambers with no women at all.

Rwanda has the highest number of women parliamentarians worldwide. Women, there have won 61.3 percent of seats in the lower house. (Fig 2.2)

There is established and growing evidence that women’s leadership in political decision-making processes improves them. Women demonstrate political leadership by working across party lines through parliamentary women’s caucuses – even in the most politically combative environments – and by championing issues of gender equality, such as the elimination of gender-based violence, parental leave and childcare, pensions, gender-equality laws, and electoral reform.

Reflection

When doing my research, I found out besides showing the percentage of woman in a national parliament, showing the percentage of man and the ratio between man and woman can be a more direct way to demonstrate gender equality. What’s more, indicate where the 50%  line is located can also show the overall pattern of all national women parliamentarians. I didn’t include the regions in this lab report, but if given more time, I want to clean up the data and import another dataset using the region. In this way, I can visualize the overall pattern of different regions.

References: 

UN Women. ‘In Brief: Women’s Leadership and Political Participation.’

Inter-Parliamentary Union (2008). Equality in Politics: A Survey of Men and Women in Parliaments.