A Critique of The World Banks Labor force participation rate Visualization

The original visualization can be found https://genderdata.worldbank.org/indicators/sl-tlf-acti-zs/

Summary of visualization

The purpose of this visualization was to demonstrate how labor participation rate has changed over time and to emphasize how this changes when we look at specific subgroups based on gender, age, income levels and location. It offers 4 different types of charts which can be used individually to look into the data. It allows us to see how labor participation changes by region, and time as well as compare how it changes for each gender.

Map

The Map allows us to see labor participation in the context of each countries location.

Trend

The Trend chart allows us to see how other groups labor participation has changed over the past few years as well as how they compare to other countries or regions when displaying multiple groups at once.

Bar

Bar gives us similiar information to the Trend chart however it allows us to see more clearly one date across many countries instead of multiple dates across a few.

Scatterplot

The Scatterplot gives us access to many other interesting datasets which we may want to plot labor participation rate against, such as GDP, what % of females have a say in household spending, what percent of a country has opened individual bank accounts and more.

Data

The data collected through the International Labour Organization. It is collected through direct survey and census data. It shows labor participation rate by age, gender and nation. Labor participation varies isn't completely defined as some surveys and censuses either do or do not include armed forces, family workers and students and informal sectors are not included it all.

Who is this visualization useful to?

This information can be useful to economists who wish to see how many participating in the workforce. Public Health workers may also use this information to improve policy relating to gender and workforce participation. Policy makers could use this information to help research current trends to help improve public work that relates to employment. Women rights advocates can use this work to help show trends in how their work effects the number of female participation in the workforce.

What questions can be asked from this visualization?

How has Labor Participation changed over the past 5 years in the USA?

The trend chart above shows that Female participation in the US labor force has increased, while the rest of the world decreased by around a percent.

How does Africa compare to South America in how many women participate in its labor force?

How do groups participation change in relation to their countries GDP?

What Works Well

The color selection for the maps works for all kinds of color blindness

Tritanopia filter

original

Interacting with the map is very intuitive, if you want more information on a country you can click on it.

The filter for the map which shows the Gender Gap shows a good amount of contrast and detail with just 7 colors

The Trend chart shows a very clear trend in how the participation rate changed over the years, it also shows very clearly how the data has been adapted between what ILO was able to survey and model, and the real data which nations report.

For the Trend, Bar and Scatterplot selecting countries is very intuitive and allows for quick searching and selection and deselection. The groupings of Region, Income level and Aggregations across the two also make sense for looking into questions about specific groups of people in specific areas of the world.

What Doesn't Work that Well

Some countries that do not have a number are labeled and listed as NA, however there are several countries which are unlabeled, and missing.

Selection of groups for the bar charts is difficult to navigate because you must select all countries individually so if you want to look at a large region with the exclusion of a new countries you may have to click on 30 or more individual checkboxes. This can be very annoying when there are outliers in a field which skew the data.

The scatter plot has a many different datasets which may be of interest to the user however the number of datasets is a bit jarring and the amount there are make scrolling through to find one which may be of interest difficult, using the selection system that they had implemented for the regions and income levels would have made things easier to find.

Changing between charts removes all previous selections which can be frustrating when you have many subgroups selected.

For items charts such as Trends and Bars I would like to be able to sort them by labor force participation, a question that came up a lot when looking at the data is how each group faired against compared the next, for example how far the first place is from second place. I think this would have helped with identifying outliers.

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