In the course of my usual data-immersion session in my RSS reader of choice I came across a short but thought-provoking post by Stephen Law linking to some data on the age of consent.
Being a big fan of data visualisation I decided to have a go at representing the data in a way that can be more easily absorbed. So, armed with the source data, a list of ISO country codes, and the docs for the Google Chart API, I started playing.
The biggest question when visualising data, just like with statistics, is deciding what you’re looking for. This data is complex enough to be difficult to show in its entirity, involving maybe a dozen or so possible pieces of information for each location.
Here I’ve opted to look at the difference between the age of consent for straight couples and gay couples.
Blue indicates larger differences between straight and gay ages of consent (or illegality)
Did you take in account of the population densitiy when asigning colours?
Nope, just the variance between the three columns of data. The very blue countries are where gay relationships are illegal… although there may well be mistakes in the original data and the nudging I had to do to make legal data fit into a sum.