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imnotreel t1_j5hnt79 wrote

Reply to comment by teamongered in Racial diversity in top tech & biotech companies [OC] by teamongered

Couple of critiques :

- The source should be stated clearly in the image.

- You shouldn't interpolate between categorical data points.

- Total population breakdown should sum up to 100% (or you should at least explain why it doesn't if there's an explanation).

- Comparing employee racial distribution to HQ state or country population is absolutely meaningless for companies who have employees in other states / countries (which is gonna be the case for all of the companies listed here)

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teamongered OP t1_j5hzn59 wrote

Thanks for the feedback.

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- Good idea. I'll do that next time.

- Hm, I disagree with you here. I added the line smoothing for the purpose of readability, otherwise the bottom left two figures would be a cloud of points. Having colored lines connecting the points makes it easier to locate each data point for a specific company/race. Besides, there was no real interpolation done here, just smooth lines connecting the categories (i.e. companies).

- I agree. I made a similar figure in the past and that is what I did, but I forgot to this time. The race percentages provided by a few companies does add up to > 100%. I presumed this is due to double counting some people who are multi-racial.

- Yeah I am not 100% sure what is the best approach. Would be incredibly hard for me to get data on how many employees are in each state for each company. On the other hand, companies having people in other countries is not a concern here because EEO-1 data is strictly USA employees. There are of course other approaches I could take for comparison, like comparing to the industry trends or demographics of people applying/interviewing, etc... but each approach has their pros/cons.

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hyunez t1_j5iqfgr wrote

Yes the dots are difficult to read, but connecting them with a line is misleading because it suggests a continuum when it is actually categorical. You need to find another way to present this in a readable way. Have you considered a double sided bar chart?

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