How long before there is gender equality in the U.S. House and Senate

For The Washington Post, Sergio Peçanha asks, “What will it take to achieve gender equality in American politics?

It will take some more time and a lot more effort to reach equal representation. I asked my colleague David Byler, a statistics expert, to estimate how long it would take for women to reach equal numbers in Congress at the current pace. His estimate: about 60 years.

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Algorithms to fix underrepresentation on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is human-edited, so naturally there are biases towards certain groups of people. Primer, an artificial intelligence startup, is working on a system that looks for people who should have an article. It’s called Quicksilver.

We trained Quicksilver’s models on 30,000 English Wikipedia articles about scientists, their Wikidata entries, and over 3 million sentences from news documents describing them and their work. Then we fed in the names and affiliations of 200,000 authors of scientific papers.

In the morning we found 40,000 people missing from Wikipedia who have a similar distribution of news coverage as those who do have articles. Quicksilver doubled the number of scientists potentially eligible for a Wikipedia article overnight.

Then, after it finds people, it generates sample articles to get things started.

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Computed screen time for men and women

screen-time

In a collaborative effort, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media computed screen time for men and women algorithmically, in contrast to the more crude measurement of script lines. Key findings:

Male characters received two times the amount of screen time as female characters in 2015 (28.5% compared to 16.0%).

When a film has a male lead, this gender gap is even wider, with male characters appearing on screen nearly three times more often than female characters (34.5% compared to 12.9%).

In films with a female lead, male characters appear about the same amount of time as female characters (24.0% compared to 22.6%). This means that even when women are featured in a leading role, male characters appear on screen just as often.

Interesting work here. I just wish they included movie names in their charts. It would’ve provided a better connection to the data.

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Gender equality in the movies, a screenplay analysis

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Hollywood has been talking gender equality in the movies more than usual lately, so Hanah Andersen and Matt Daniels for Polygraph looked into the matter from a data perspective.

We didn’t set out trying to prove anything, but rather compile real data. We framed it as a census rather than a study. So we Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of words spoken by male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.

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Gender gaps around the world

Closing the gap around the world

Ri Liu provides an exploratory view of gender gaps around the world through labor participation, parliament participation, and income. Be sure to try the sorting options, which help you pull out quick insights from about 160 time series.

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Equality for women and girls, 20-year report

No Ceilings

In their continued work on the No Ceilings project, Fathom describes the current iteration of the site that shows 20 years of data, across hundreds of indicators.

We identified more than twenty data-driven narratives that could be explored or illustrated visually. While some stories contained ample information to work as full interactive pieces, other stories were better served as headlines with simpler graphics. In addition, users can see the entire data set mapped by country from 1995 to the present, across 850,000 data points.

Explore individual indicators through topical graphics, or browse all the data via the global map. You can also download the data as a bunch of CSV files.

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No Ceilings highlights progress towards gender equality

No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project, an initiative from the Clinton Foundation, aims to highlight progress towards global gender equality using data.

To understand where we need to go, we need to know what we've achieved. The No Ceilings project will work with leading technology partners to create a comprehensive and accessible global review that will bring together and widely distribute the best data on the status of women and girls and their contributions to prosperity and security. Advocates, academics and leaders will be able to see the gains we've made, as well as the gaps that remain, and access and share this information across platforms in order to design reforms and drive real change.

The video above by Fathom Information Design is one piece of the launch, touching on education, salary, and mortality.

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