I began my exploration on the Pew Research Center’s website, a resource I’ve always appreciated for its international tracking of attitudes and behaviors. They often tackle topics that feel thorny and include countries that don’t typically get much attention.

One of their recent publications caught my eye: an article about women in leadership among UN member states. It included a graph showing which countries have had a woman as the head of government.

Looking at this visualization, I saw an opportunity for improvement. While the global map format is a familiar and effective way to visualize the “spread,” it also has some inherent flaws. These flaws can mislead viewers, whether they’re colorblind or not.

Two specific challenges stood out to me:

1. Impact: The map shaded countries in green if they’d ever had a woman leader, but this approach oversimplifies the reality. It suggests an apples-to-apples comparison, which isn’t the most accurate. For example, as someone who grew up in Canada, I know we’ve had a woman as head of government, Kim Campbell. But her time in office lasted 130 days, and she never faced parliament during her tenure. Counting that as a ‘win’ felt like a bit of a stretch, and given the size of Canada on the map, makes it look like we’ve made more progress globally than we have. Which brings me to my second point…

2. Landmass vs. Population: While landmass might be relevant for certain contexts, like environmental policy, it doesn’t provide as clear a sense of global progress. A better metric might focus on the size of the population under women leaders, as it gives a more meaningful perspective on representation.

In the same article, Pew provided a table with information about the tenure of the current heads of government, which I thought would be a great way to address the first challenge. I started digging for a dataset that could provide both current and past tenures, but unfortunately, I came up short.

But while out searching, I stumbled upon an intriguing visualization from UN Women. This one focused on the percentage of women in parliament, which I found even more promising for a rework.

This new data addressed challenge #1, as it provided richer context than a simple yes/no categorization. But it still fell short on challenge #2: it retained the map projection issue, and its color scale was both overly complex and unfriendly to colorblind viewers. This made it hard to interpret where countries fell on the spectrum of representation.

To improve this, I decided to take the underlying data, append population sizes for each country, and use both size and color to represent the current state of affairs more effectively.

Finding a tool to execute my vision proved harder than expected.

In Flourish, I tried two different chart types, but couldn’t get the color range to work as a continuous variable on a scale. The results were… not pretty.

I ran into similar issues with Datawrapper.

Finally, I turned to my most reliable viz partner: R. By plotting circles over capitals (since parliaments are usually based there), I managed to preserve some geographic context while prioritizing size and color to convey the most important information.























Once I had a working version in R, I gave Flourish another shot—and bam! It worked, with full interactivity.

Browser Based Visualization With Colorblind Friendly Color Palette
12/01/2025
Ivan Stefanac

Flourish Attempts

Datawrapper Attempt

Source: Pew Research Center

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/03/women-leaders-around-the-world/?tabItem=f27b27a1-f98f-4870-b680-d1a19b6b386a

Source: UN Women

https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2023/03/women-in-politics-map-2023