How do we really feel about women leaders?

The Reykjavik Index for Leadership measures how people feel about women in leadership. It measures the perceived legitimacy of male and female leadership in politics and across twenty professions, as well as a measure of how men and women differ in their views, and the extent to which men and women are viewed equally in terms of suitability of individuals for positions of power.

The Index evaluates the G7 groups of nations, surveying the attitudes of more than 10,000 people.

The Index and the findings was presented during the Women Leaders Global Forum, held in Reykjavik 26–28 November 2018.

Over the last two years, the movement for fairness and equality between men and women has found renewed energy and conviction around the world. In public life, in politics, in business, and across different economic sectors, women and men have been working for change and a world where economic opportunity is no longer shaped and constrained by being a man or being a woman.

I have developed a Data Dashboard/Presentation which presents the Key Insights from the Report

Problem Statement

Analyse and document the areas of progress in equality among men and women and check the evidence to have a measure of the difference in equality in leadership between men and women w.r.t social norm’s in the various G7 countries. We will use The Reykjavik Index for Leadership to measure our progress on the journey ahead.

Why my choice of Charts/Presentation Style is better ?

The original article has too much text. This works as an essay or a news article, but will fail for a Presentation for an audience! The plot included in it, “Circular Progress Plot” is a little difficult to grasp as the values it shows does NOT depend on the length of each circular line, but only its ending point. This is why we usually tend to avoid such plots.

This is the sole plot in the article, and the rest of the information is conveyed via huge text and tables.

I have improved upon this by using a much more readily interpret-able horizontal bar plot, which has the average score also shown, used color encoding to differentiate the country grouping according to the same score. I have also condensed the important points from the article into smaller points and added a second line plot that add to the information being conveyed. Doing all this has made the information more apt and ready to be disseminated to an audience in a meaningful manner!

Data Limitations/Constraints

Band Wagon Effect-Due to the style of the collection of this data, I fear that there is a good chance of having the band-wagon effect. This refers to the impulse to choose certain option or follow particular behavior, because other people are doing it. This leads to a dangerous cycle, as more people continue to follow a trend makes it more likely that other people hop on the band wagon.

Confirmation bias- Our strong belief system forces us to ignore any information that doesn’t conform with our preconceived notions. This may have happened during Data Processing!

Confounding Variables-There may be external factors that may have affected the answer given by the sample population for which we do not have the data. This bias may have hampered our Insights!

Moving forward

The index and the wider study have given us a clear insight into the powerful dissonance at play across the G7 and within the group’s individual countries. Men and women hold similar degrees of prejudice, reminding us of the efforts needed to overcome the social phenomenon of sexism.

The results also show how women are pulling ahead in their views of men and women being equally suitable to lead. These are signs of progress, yet more work needs to be done to reduce male/female dissonance, and to remove the tensions in our workplaces, homes and communities.

In the future, we will extend this survey to other nations, giving us greater evidence to use to help drive social progress. The index will help us to understand how we can more quickly see attitudes about men and women in leadership reach equality, to the benefit of all.

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