I’ve only had intermittent WiFi access over the past 48 hours but earlier today I caught a discussion relating to the percentage of delegates attending data visualisation training who are female.
Any ongoing discussion about gender balance and participation of women in our field is of great value and having trained over 800 delegates since November 2011 I felt I had a good sample size from which to draw some analysis relating to this issue. Instinctively, I responded to Lynn Cherny’s tweet below with an estimate of about 35% of delegates being female but I decided to do some quick work to firm this up.
Instinctively feels better than the 25% from census, ~35%? RT @arnicas: Folks who teach infovis courses: what’s your gender ratio in class?
— Andy Kirk (@visualisingdata) April 17, 2013
I went through my records and marked up the gender of those attending my public training classes. I don’t have sufficiently detailed records of those who attended private training events, which make up about half of this dataset, so I discounted these from the investigation. This gave me a sample total of 430 people. A quick bit of analysis and presentation in Excel is shown below, click for a larger view.
Aside from revealing my incredible powers of astuteness (35% vs. 36.5% is pretty good, let’s face it!) the main headline from this analysis reveals that the percentage of attendees who are female is higher those participating in the recent data visualisation census. Perhaps this shows that a healthier ‘pipeline’ of females entering/learning about the field.