More on bad displays of data

A picture is worth a thousand words, but a graph has to meet certain guidelines to be useful. Quiz question, what's wrong with this graph?



(From Mark Perry's Carpe Diem)

Answer: The two vertical axes change at different rates. A step of 2,000 on the left (men) doesn't move as far up the graph as a step of 2,000 on the right (women). That makes direct comparisons quite difficult. The slopes of the lines can not be compared.

As for the data. Sorry guys, as with most things these days, you're out of luck. And you wonder why men are always portrayed as idiots on TV! You're losing, we're winning, get used to it.

Addendum: This is interesting...

Further analysis shows that 72% of the job losses (3.483 million) were jobs held by males, and 22% of the jobs lost (981,000) were jobs held by females (see top chart above).

Check my arithmetic, but I could swear that adding the men and women together should add up to 100%, not 94%. Who exactly are the other 6%? Hermaphrodites from Jupiter?

Update again: Mr. Perry fixed his post to show 78% of jobs were from men, 22% for women. He also showed bad form and removed my comment on his post pointing out the error.

Update: Glenn Reynolds also linked to Mark Perry's post today. Of course, I beat him to it.