Day of the year companies stop paying women

One way to think about gender pay gap is to imagine women receive the same pay as men each working day until they reach their salary. At some point during the year, women effectively work for free. With a new law that requires companies in Great Britain with 250 or more employees to report pay gap, The Guardian provides a calendar view into the newly reported data that shows the day of the year the free work starts.

The scroller shows companies as you move down the calendar. The information feels less overwhelming than seeing it all at once, and a running counter keeps track of what you already saw.

See also The Guardian’s breakdown by sector.

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Missing 11th of the month

xkcd meaningful dates

David Hagan looked closer at why the 11th of the month appeared to be missing in books. As with many modern curiosities, it began with an xkcd comic.

First I confirmed that the 11th is actually interesting. There are 31 days and one of them has to be smallest. Maybe the 11th isn’t an outlier; it’s just on the smaller end and our eyes are picking up on a pattern that doesn’t exist. To confirm this is real, I compared actual numbers, not text size. The Ngrams database returns the total number times a phrase is mentioned in a given year normalized by the total number of books published that year. The database only goes up to the year 2008, so it is presumably unchanged from when Randall queried it in 2012.

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