Data Feminism on Visualizing.JP

Dropping Pink and Blue, Giving Women the Purple That Stands Out on White: The Telegraph's "Born Equal. Treated Unequally."

Sat, 07 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0900

For its charts on gender inequality, The Telegraph dropped pink and blue and used the purple and green of the suffrage movement. Which color went to which sex was decided by how they look against a white background: purple, which stands out more than green on white, went to women. The interactive piece with this palette, “Born Equal. Treated Unequally.,” was published on 8 March 2018, International Women’s Day.

The Telegraph piece itself is for subscribers only, and I have not been able to read it. What follows about the charts comes through two sources: Chapter 4 of Data Feminism (2020) by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, which shows the work as Figure 4.6, and a Datawrapper blog post (10 July 2018) in which Lisa Charlotte Muth put questions to Fraser Lyness, who chose the colors.

8 March 2018: A Piece for International Women’s Day

According to Data Feminism, in March 2018 reporters on The Telegraph’s Lifestyle Desk were thinking about how to mark International Women’s Day. What caught their eye was the gender gap in the UK across education, politics, business, and culture.

Item	Detail	Source
Title	“Born Equal. Treated Unequally.” (Datawrapper writes “Born equal. Treated unequally”)	Data Feminism note 48, Datawrapper
Publication date	8 March 2018	Data Feminism note 48
Text authors	Claire Cohen, Patrick Scott, Ellie Kempster	Same
Production credits	The three above, plus Richard Moynihan, Oliver Edgington, Dario Verrengia, Fraser Lyness, George Ioakeimidis, Jamie Johnson	Data Feminism Fig. 4.6
Who chose the colors	Fraser Lyness (Director of Graphic Journalism) and his team	Datawrapper

The article’s URL contains “women-mean-business-interactive.” In an October 2018 article, The Telegraph’s Jamie Johnson writes that on International Women’s Day the paper launched “Women Mean Business,” a campaign to support women entrepreneurs. The same article also describes 2018 as the year of celebrating 100 years of women’s suffrage. I have found no source, however, saying that this piece was timed to that centenary.

According to Data Feminism, the data from other institutions that the reporters used all came in a male/female binary. The categories could not be changed. What could be changed was the color.

Borrowing the Suffrage Movement’s Purple and Green

The quickest colors for separating men from women are pink and blue. In the Datawrapper post, Lisa Charlotte Muth cites a “Chart Doctor” column by Alan Smith of the FT (I have not read the original column; I checked it against the passage the Datawrapper post quotes). Smith wrote that he used pink and blue because the link between color and sex is so strong that no legend is needed, which keeps the chart clean. Muth writes that pink and blue reinforce gender stereotypes and are especially counterproductive in charts about inequality.

Data Feminism makes the same point.

“Pink and blue is, after all, another hierarchy, and the goal of the Telegraph team members was to mitigate inequality, not reinforce it.”

In short, pink and blue is itself a hierarchy, and the team’s aim was to ease inequality, not to reinforce it.

The team chose purple and green. In Lyness’s account, these were the colors of the “Votes for Women” campaign in early twentieth-century Britain.

“At the heart of this movement were “Sylvia Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and essentially the colors were their choice (apparently symbolizing; purple for freedom and dignity, white for purity, green for hope).””

The colors were chosen by Sylvia Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, who stood at the center of the movement, and are said to stand for freedom and dignity (purple), purity (white), and hope (green). Of these, the team used purple and green for the sexes.

Posters, a sash, badges, a ticket, and a book cover printed in the three colors of purple, white, and green for “Votes for Women”

Source: Lisa Charlotte Muth, Datawrapper Blog

Lyness says the reference to the suffrage movement “sealed the deal.”

“Having a reference to the suffrage movement helped seal the deal”

Nobody objected to the fact that, without pink and blue, the sex of a group is not obvious at a glance, he says. Rather, Lyness answers, everyone felt that pink and blue would undermine the message they wanted to convey.

Purple, Which Stands Out on White, for the Smaller Group

The purple-and-green pair was chosen for what it means. Then which sex gets the purple? Lyness answers:

“Against white, purple registers with far greater contrast and so should attract more attention when putting alongside the green, not by much but just enough to tip the scales. In a lot of the visualisations men largely outnumber women, so it was a fairly simple method of bringing them back into focus.”

On a white background, purple has much stronger contrast and draws attention when placed next to green. The difference is not large, but it is enough to tip the scales. Because men far outnumber women in many of the charts, it was a simple way to bring women back into focus. Before this, Lyness also says, they had wanted to give priority to women.

The contrast is “far greater,” but the pull on attention is “not by much.” This can be read as the idea that the effect of making something stand out can be modest; it is enough for the scales to tip a little.

Datawrapper shows the following image as a chart where this effect is easy to see.

On a white background, a large green circle for 757 plaques (86%) for men and a small purple circle for 127 plaques (14%) for women sit on either side of a vertical line

Source: The Telegraph / Datawrapper Blog

The header reads “Women Mean Business” and “ENGLISH HERITAGE BLUE PLAQUES.” Of 884 blue plaques, 757 are for men and 127 for women. Measuring the image, the ratio of the circles’ areas can be read as close to the ratio of the counts (about 6 to 1). Datawrapper does not say which part of the piece this image comes from.

Figure 4.6 of Data Feminism lines up FTSE 100 CEOs as human-shaped icons filled in purple and green. The accompanying text reads “Just six of FTSE 100 CEOs are women.”

There is one more purple-and-green chart, for which the source article is not named.

A bar chart showing the distribution of companies’ gender pay gaps. Bars where women fall below are green, bars where they are above are purple, and bars near zero are gray; green bars make up most of the chart

Source: The Telegraph / Datawrapper Blog

It shows the gap between men’s and women’s median hourly pay across all companies, as a distribution of the number of companies. In the legend, “Women trail men” is green and “Women lead men” is purple. Here the colors stand for the direction of the gap, not for sex, but the idea of making the smaller side purple can be read as the same. Datawrapper writes that the same palette was also used in a pay-gap article (paywalled) of 22 March 2018.

Data	Visual channel	Specifics	Source
Sex	Hue	Women = purple, men = green	Datawrapper, Data Feminism
Male/female CEOs	Human-shaped icons	Purple and green, legend “Men / Women”	Data Feminism Fig. 4.6
Number of plaques	Circle size	Men 757 (green), women 127 (purple)	Datawrapper image
Direction of pay gap	Bar color	Below = green, above = purple	Datawrapper image
Color values	n/a	Not confirmed	n/a

What Colors Did Other Newsrooms Use?

The Datawrapper post says that Muth’s piece grew out of a tweet by the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch (I have not read the tweet). The tweet lined up the colors that outlets used in reporting UK pay-gap data.

Category	Examples (according to the Datawrapper post)
Pink and blue (red and blue)	NYT (2015, 2017), Bloomberg (2016), WSJ (2016), Daily Mail (2018), ZEIT (2016, 2018), two of The Pudding’s film pieces (2017)
Other colors	Economist, Guardian, FT, Telegraph, Bloomberg (all 2018), Morgenpost (2017), Washington Post (2017), BBC (2017, 2018), and others
Inconsistent within one outlet	Bloomberg’s four pieces in 2018 each use different colors. Quartz swaps the pink-and-blue assignment from article to article

For another work by The Pudding, see the Women’s Pockets article in the same series.

Part of the charts from outlets that did not use pink and blue. The sexes are colored in various pairs, such as teal and vermilion, purple and brown, orange and navy

Source: charts by each outlet / Lisa Charlotte Muth (Datawrapper Blog)

Muth writes that the Economist, Guardian, Telegraph, Washington Post, and others gave women a cooler color than men, and remarks, “You can’t go further away from the norm.” On the other hand, she calls swapping the assignment, as Quartz does, risky: readers who see pink and blue do not check the legend, so women may be read as the better-off group.

How Third Parties Saw This Palette

The first, Muth, praises the fact that the reasoning could be put into words. Lyness did not simply pick two pretty colors; he could explain why, she writes, and she titled the section “How to choose colors: The Telegraph case.”

The second, Data Feminism, cites the piece as an example of a situation where the makers cannot choose how the data is collected and can only “hack” binary data from the inside.

“Here, one hierarchy—the hierarchy in which colors are perceived by the eye—was employed to challenge another one: the hierarchy of gender.”

The assessment is that a hierarchy of visible color was used to challenge a hierarchy of gender. The book adds, however, that the team could have gone one step further.

“They had an opportunity to communicate to the public that gender is not a binary by spelling that out—in the text of the story or in a caption under the graphics or by showing visually that there was no data for nonbinary people.”

The criticism is that they could have told the public that gender is not a binary, in the text, in a caption, or by showing in a graphic that there was no data on nonbinary people.

The contrast the book draws is The Guardian’s “Does the New Congress Reflect You?” (2018). It has three categories: cis male, cis female, and trans + nonbinary. Choosing trans + nonbinary turns every district gray and displays “0 people in Congress are like you.” The book writes that the absence of data becomes an important conclusion in itself. The same section then moves on to how to depict gender itself, taking up a figure by Amanda Montañez of Scientific American (the Beyond XX and XY article).

The third is the research side. In a 2024 paper analyzing gender visualizations from 2012 to 2022, Cabric et al. wrote that alternative palettes such as purple and green “remain uncommon.” They do not name The Telegraph; the mention comes by way of Muth’s post. They also list the option of dropping color and distinguishing by label or position.

Takeaways

There are four judgments to take away.

The first is to separate the reason for choosing the colors from the reason for assigning them. The pair was chosen for its meaning and the assignment for how it looks. Because there were two reasons, it can be read as the team being able to push through, internally, the decision to give up pink and blue, which need no legend.

The second is to give the more eye-catching color to the smaller group. The luminance difference from the background can be compared with measures such as the WCAG ratio or APCA, covered in the color contrast article. These, however, are measures of text legibility, not of how easily something attracts attention. That the effect need only be “not by much” is Lyness’s own phrasing.

The third is to keep the assignment fixed within a publication. If you swap it, as Quartz does, it will be read in the opposite sense.

The fourth is to remember that changing colors does not change the categories. If you have only binary data, you can state that limit in the body text or in a caption. There is also the route, as in The Guardian, of showing the absence of data in the graphic itself.

References

Primary sources

Claire Cohen, Patrick Scott, Ellie Kempster et al., “Born Equal. Treated Unequally.,” The Telegraph, 2018-03-08 (subscribers only; not read by the author). Article
Fraser Lyness’s remarks (in Lisa Charlotte Muth’s Datawrapper post). Article
Jamie Johnson, “Women Mean Business: How the Telegraph’s campaign unfolded,” The Telegraph, 2018-10-31 (Yahoo reprint). Article
The Telegraph’s pay-gap article using the same palette, 2018-03-22 (subscribers only; not read by the author). Article

Secondary sources

Lisa Charlotte Muth (then Rost), “An alternative to pink & blue: Colors for gender data,” Datawrapper Blog, 2018-07-10. Article (old URL: https://blog.datawrapper.de/gendercolor/)
Alan Smith, FT “Chart Doctor” column (on the pink-and-blue baby names chart). Confirmed from the quotation in the Datawrapper post; original not read. Datawrapper post
John Burn-Murdoch’s tweet (lining up the colors outlets used in UK pay-gap reporting). Confirmed from the mention in the Datawrapper post; original tweet not read. Datawrapper post
Catherine D’Ignazio & Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism, MIT Press, 2020, ch.4 “What Gets Counted Counts,” pp.111–113, fig.4.6–4.7, notes 48–50 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Open-access edition at the Internet Archive
Sam Morris, Juweek Adolphe, Erum Salam, “Does the New Congress Reflect You?,” The Guardian, 2018 (comparison example in Data Feminism; not read by the author). Article
Cabric, Bjarnadóttir, Ling, Rafnsdóttir, Isenberg, “Eleven Years of Gender Data Visualization: A Step Towards More Inclusive Gender Representation,” IEEE TVCG 30(1):316–326, 2024. doi:10.1109/TVCG.2023.3327369 / arXiv

Painting 100 Years as 10×10 and One Year as 3×3: Peabody's Chronological History of the United States (1856)

Sat, 07 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0900

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s chronological chart divided a century into 10×10 cells (one cell per year) and each year into 3×3 cells (kinds of events), and painted the nations in color. In her 1850 manual, it was a tool for pupils to color in themselves in order to memorize dates. The instruction to have pupils color a blank chart is on p.5 of the 1850 edition. The 1856 Chronological History of the United States came with plates in which four centuries, the 16th to the 19th, were already painted.

What follows draws on the 1856 edition as scanned at the Internet Archive (from the Library of Congress collection), on Peabody’s own explanatory text, and on her earlier book (1850). The second half looks at the reconstruction “The Shape of History” by Lauren F. Klein and colleagues, and at how Data Feminism (2020) treats Peabody.

1850 and 1856: Bem’s method applied to U.S. history

Peabody (1804–1894) was an editor and educator who ran a bookshop in Boston. In 1850 she published a manual of world history, The Polish-American System of Chronology. Its subtitle says that it reproduces, with some modifications, the method of General Józef Bem.

According to Klein’s Data by Design (2026), the lecturer Joseph Podbielski, who came from Poland with Bem’s charts, stayed for a time with the Peabody family. Peabody, the book says, was “captivated” by the charts.

In 1856 she published a U.S. history textbook with Sheldon, Blakeman & Company of New York. Its title says “arranged with plates on Bem’s principle.” The publisher’s advertisement speaks of “painted Plates of the four last Centuries.” These are four plates, covering the 16th to the 19th centuries, and the 19th ends at 1850. The “To the Teacher” chapter states the aim as follows.

“A chronological outline of the chain of events may certainly be impressed on the mind, by means of that natural memorizer, the sense of sight, addressed by these colored symbols, before historical causes can be appreciated”

In other words, even before the causes are understood, colored symbols can impress the sequence of events on the memory through the sense of sight.

A century as 10×10, a year as 3×3

The rules are in the section “THE PAINTED CENTURIES” (pp.9–10). Following the text, they can be set out in a table.

Data	How the chart shows it	Peabody’s explanation (1856 edition)
A century	One large square	“a large square, divided into a hundred smaller squares”
A year	One of the 10×10 cells	The upper left is 1501. One row is ten years. Cells in the same column share the last digit
50-year and 5-year divisions	Heavy lines below the fifth row and at the middle of each row	“landmarks for the eye”
Kind of event	Position within the 3×3 grid of the year’s cell	The nine kinds in the table below
Nation or people	Color	Brick red = Spain, blue = France, purple = England, bluish green = Sweden, yellowish green = Holland, orange = Americans
Event involving two nations	Colors meeting on a diagonal	“When colors slant to each other, the nations concur in events.”
Several unrelated events	Parallelograms	“they are painted in parallelograms”
Epoch-making event	The whole cell of the year	“Epochal events fill the whole square”

The nine small cells are as follows. The numbers are the ones used in the explanation in the text.

	Left	Center	Right
Top	1 Battles, sieges, declarations of war	2 Conquests, annexations, unions	3 Losses, disasters
Middle	4 Fall of a nation	5 Founding of a nation, revolutions	6 Treaties, other
Bottom	7 Births	8 Deeds	9 Deaths (in each case of eminent persons)

The table for Plate I (pp.13–14) specifies where to paint for each event. For 1501, Henry VII’s patent for colonization is painted purple in the sixth small cell of the upper-left cell. For 1512, Ponce de Leon’s discovery of Florida is painted brick red in the eighth small cell of the twelfth cell. For 1565, the founding of St. Augustine has the upper halves of the first and second small cells, plus the fifth and eighth, in Spanish brick red. The lower half of the second and the third are blue, standing for France’s loss.

Enlargement of the upper left of the 16th-century plate. A 3×3 sample numbered 1 to 9 is printed in the second cell, and a dark reddish-brown square sits at the middle right of the first cell

Elizabeth P. Peabody (1856), held by the Library of Congress. From the Internet Archive, partially enlarged (public domain)

In the scan, the sample of 1 to 9 is printed in the second cell, and the other cells have no lines marking the small cells. In a note to the 18th-century table, Peabody asks the reader to keep “keeping in mind the subdivision into ninths, even where it is not marked off”. That is, even without lines, the reader is to read with the ninefold division in mind.

Machine chronologique set time out on a single line at 0.1 inch per year. Peabody folds 100 years back every ten years and makes a surface of them. Every year gets a cell of the same size, and years with many events and years with few are the same size.

Pupils color, the teacher points with a stick

The 1850 manual says it is best for pupils to color blank charts themselves.

“it will be best for the pupils, in all cases, to have blank representations, and to color them themselves, according to the lessons given them.”

It goes on to call the coloring an “agreeable” and “profitable” exercise, in which the attention given to coloring fixes each nation’s color in memory. If there are no paints, one can write color numbers instead, but “a vast advantage is given up,” it adds. In class, the teacher points at a large chart with a stick and the pupils answer with the year and the event (1850 edition, pp.14–15).

The 1856 edition comes with painted plates, and says that empty cells can be filled in with pen with contemporary European events (p.6).

“It is easier to remember the relative locality of the representation, than to remember the figures of the dates”

That is, a place in the chart is easier to remember than the digits of a year.

Plate for the 18th century. The cell for 1776 is mostly orange with a reversed-out “I,” and the surrounding cells are divided by diagonals into dark reddish brown and orange

Elizabeth P. Peabody (1856), held by the Library of Congress. From the Internet Archive (public domain)

In the explanation of the 18th century (pp.122–123), the cell for 1775 is divided by a diagonal. The upper triangle is the orange of the victorious Americans, and the rest is the purple of the defeated British. The cell for 1776 is “nearly filled with the orange,” and Britain’s loss enters in purple in the third small cell.

According to Klein, the surviving workbooks show a few pages colored in earnest, then abandoned partway, and eventually turning into pattern play.

Five points on which the sources differ

The following five points are described differently depending on the source. They are listed by source.

Issue	Source	What it says
Who started the method	Peabody (1850 ed., p.4)	“The invention of the Charts by General Bem”
	Public Domain Review	Conceived by Antoni Jażwiński in the 1820s, spread by Bem
	Data by Design	Born in Poland in the 1820s, spread by Bem
Whose idea the ninefold division was	Peabody (1850 ed., p.10)	What she cites are the colors and the omission of the charts for ancient periods
	Data by Design	“She also borrows the idea of subdividing each square”
	Public Domain Review	“her chart further divides up the (previously) smallest unit into a 3x3 grid”
England’s color	Peabody (1856 ed., p.10)	Purple
	Data by Design	The 1607 cell is “entirely red”
	The Shape of History CSV	#8D2B1D (reddish brown)
Whether the large charts survive	Abstracts of DH2017 and DH2018; main text of Data by Design	They do not. The text says “not a single one has been preserved”
	Figure data of Data by Design	Calls “Christian Era” (ca. 1850) “The only extant example”
Year of the chart	Caption of Data Feminism Figure 3.3; DH2018 abstract	“(1865)”
	Image credit in Data Feminism; title page of the scan	1856

Peabody does not count the ninefold division among her own changes. It can be read as inherited from Bem.

As for England’s color, in this scan the color said to be purple looks dark reddish brown, and France, said to be blue, looks blue-green. I have not checked whether this is fading or a difference in printing. The 1607 (Jamestown) cell is entirely that dark reddish brown, and Klein’s “red” can be read as a name for the printed color as seen.

Plate for the 17th century. The 1607 cell is fully painted dark reddish brown, and there are also cells divided by diagonals and green cells

Elizabeth P. Peabody (1856), held by the Library of Congress. From the Internet Archive (public domain)

I have not been able to read the descriptions at the David Rumsey Map Collection and Raremaps, which are said to hold “Christian Era.” “1865” can be read as a transposition of the digits in 1856.

How third parties saw the chart

Contemporary assessment survives in the publisher’s advertisements. J. H. Raymond, principal of the Polytechnic School in Brooklyn, recommended Bem’s method as “OUT OF SIGHT SUPERIOR” to other mnemonic systems for dates.

In 2016, the Digital Humanities Lab at Georgia Tech created “The Shape of History” at Klein’s initiative. It converts Peabody’s tables into a CSV of year, nation, kind, and description. On its Compare screen, the same events are laid side by side in the grid and in an ordinary timeline. Its introduction asks:

“What would it mean if a visualization was designed to be difficult and abstract?”

That is, what if a visualization were deliberately made difficult and abstract? Klein calls Peabody’s chart “abstract rather than intuitive.”

Catherine D’Ignazio and Klein’s Data Feminism mentions Peabody on pp.77–78. It is a short introduction alongside Du Bois and others, with no explanation of the rules.

Jessica DeSpain, in a 2018 review, took issue with the reconstruction.

“the background information on Peabody delivers minimal insight into why someone would engage with this project who is not invested in the nineteenth-century or data visualization.”

The criticism is that it does not convey why anyone not interested in the 19th century or in visualization should engage with it.

Takeaways

There are four judgments to take away.

The first is to fold time back into a surface. Folding at ten years puts years with the same last digit in the same column. This can be read as the same idea as the calendar heat map, which folds by the week. The form is the same as a 100-cell waffle chart, but one cell is one year, not a proportion.

The second is to express categories by position within a cell. Playfair’s circles drew quantity with area and angle, and Minard’s map with the width of a band. Peabody draws no quantity; she assigns kind to position and nation to color.

The third is not to draw everything. Peabody wrote that a good chronological chart, like a good school map, does not show everything but represents “enough is represented to suggest where everything else should come” (p.11). Klein lists “Design to support increased knowledge, not complete knowledge” among the takeaways for designers in Chapter 4. This can be read as overlapping with Peabody’s idea on p.11.

The fourth is to check whether the rules fit the data format. The Shape of History CSV splits an event involving two nations into one row per nation. In the floor installation, there is one LED per small cell, and DH2017 writes “We cannot account for multiple simultaneous events.” Diagonals and parallelograms can be read as hard to fit into a format with one value per cell.

References

Primary sources

Elizabeth P. Peabody, Chronological History of the United States, arranged with plates on Bem’s principle, New York: Sheldon, Blakeman, 1856 (pp.5–6, 9–14, 122–123, publisher’s advertisement at the end). Internet Archive / Full text / Metadata
Elizabeth P. Peabody, The Polish-American System of Chronology, reproduced, with some modifications, from General Bem’s Franco-Polish Method, Boston/New York: G. P. Putnam, 1850 (pp.3–15). Internet Archive
Catherine D’Ignazio, Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism, MIT Press, 2020 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; Chapter 3, pp.77–80, Figure Credits). Internet Archive
Source of The Shape of History (index.html, CSV). GitHub / Site: shapeofhistory.net (currently unreachable)
Caroline Foster et al., “The Shape of History: Reimagining Nineteenth-Century Data Visualization,” DH2017. PDF
Alexandra Beall, Courtney Allen et al., “Reimagining Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Lost ‘Mural Charts’,” DH2018. Abstract / DH Abstracts
Lauren F. Klein et al., “The Shape of History: Reimagining Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Feminist Visualization Work,” Feminist Media Histories 3(3), 2017, 149–153. UC Press (main text not read)
Lauren F. Klein et al., Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, 1789–1900, MIT Press, 2026. Chapter 4, “Knowledge.” dataxdesign.io / Text and figure data (GitHub)

Secondary sources

Jessica DeSpain, “The Feminist Forebears of Affective Design,” Commonplace 18.1 (Winter 2018). Article
Hunter Dukes, Adam Green, “Visualizing History: The Polish System,” The Public Domain Review. Article
University of Oregon, “Polish-American System of Chronology” (prototype). Page
Raremaps (Ruderman Antique Maps), sales page for “Christian Era.” Page (main text not read)