Abstract:

In the scope of a Summer School course of the project EQUALS-EU that took place in June 2023, in Valencia, the authors conducted a workshop on visualizing the gender gap. At the workshop participated a total of 10 students, which were all female, and from different nationalities (Spain, Sweeden, Colombia, Kenya, Greece, Germany, Pakistan and the Philippines).

The first part of the workshop was focused in explaining some fundamentals about data visualization, such as how to map data onto aesthetics, the main graphs to represent what type of data, and the relevance to tell a story with the graph. Then, some existing, interactive visualizations centred in gender-issues, were explored and commented. For instance, the interactive graphs related to the EU Gender Equality Index were seen as an outstanding compilation of visualizations to evidence the gender gap at the EU level. Students commented about the fact that such an index (and related visualizations) would be of interest if applied to all countries on the world, while being aware of the problem that not all the countries would be in favour of delivering the information required to compute the index.

In the second part of the workshop, students participated in collaboratively creating an interactive map, which displayed the Nobel Prize Awarded Women. The task that students had to fulfil was to search for specific data of each of the awardees on the internet, and then complete and a collaborative spreadsheet. This information was then loaded by an application built with RStudio, were the coding for building such a map was already implemented making use of the R language and the Leaflet library to deal with the geographical representation of data. The map highlights the fact that many women were born and have worked on different countries, when receiving the Nobel Prize, which can be a symptom of lack of professional opportunities in their own country.

Keywords:

Workshop, data visualization gender gap, collaborative thematic map.