I thought the above chart on the left was interesting, if not quite as effective as another chart might be. Most would have jumped to a pie chart, or maybe a stacked bar chart, but the WSJ today created a…”Dot Bar Graph”? I don’t know what you’d call it, but it did take me a moment to figure it out as a reader. And then after I did figure it out, second guessed myself due to the removal of the %’s after 40%. (Were there only 27 women polled, I wondered?)
After a few moments, I realized that all the numbers (which are percentages) add up to 100%—something that is not so intuitive since the scale ends at 40%.
Perhaps they didn’t want to do a bar graph (which is perfectly acceptable when all values add up to 100%) so as not to confuse things with the bar graph on the right?
So, in the end, it’s “interesting” to me. But maybe a stacked bar chart or tree map would have been better?
