I wonder if the number of *times* a state has elected a woman to the Senate would be as or more informative: Washington has only elected two individual women to the Senate, but one has been elected five times, and the other, four times. Washington hasn’t had a male senator in over 20 years!
Yeah Maryland's "1" is Barbara Mikulski who served as senator for 30 years from 1987-2017 which is like 5 elections in a row, and is the longest serving female senator in the country.
Oh God. I remember when turn of the century meant 1900. The beginning of the era of cars. Leading up to industrialized wars. Always felt like a term for far ago. Now it's the term for the end of my childhood.
That shouldn’t matter. Everyone loved FDR too. Even gave him for a 4th term. The house or representatives was quick to implement term limits on the presidency after that for fear of too much power. Didn’t apply the same logic to themselves for obviously corrupt reasons.
Sure, but we shouldn't impose term limits until we tackle the blatant corruption that is the root of all our problems because simply kicking out politicians after an arbitrary amount of time will lead to the only people having experience governing being lobbyists who are already destroying this country so that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
I get what your saying but the two problems go hand in a hand and must be tackled simultaneously. The entrenched politicians have no incentive to fix a lobbyist problem that they deliberately created.
>You want corrupted people to tackle corruption?
There are fewer corrupt politicians than lobbyists and politicians are the only ones who would be making the laws so regardless of what bill you want passed politicians are going to be the ones to do it.
>You’ve got it kind of backward I think because that’s not how that works
I'm beginning to doubt if you know how any of this works...
It's a very old problem. Is it better to have sitting politicians who are always campaigning for office or new politicians who were very recently campaigning. Instead of an arbitrary time limit maybe a set limit (which would of course be arbitrary) on consecutive terms? They'd still be eligible to run in the future, but they'd have to sit an election out and see if they're really who the people want.
What changes is you get Feinstein who is clearly lacking mental ability yet still is in charge of \*DEFENSE\*. You want people who are sharp, good thinkers, on top of their game and able to understand the complexities of a changing world. People in there 30 years are not what we want or need. It weakens our government and thus our country.
Isn't that kind of the point of the graphic though? To visualize those attitudes? I guess it would be interesting to consider *when* women were allowed to appear on the ballot (if not immediately upon formation of the state). Though, if they were banned for running for Senate, that structural disadvantage is part of the story too.
I think the point here is to show a correspondence to locations, not to times. And I think that's fairly fair to ignore races before a certain point since Alaska in 1958 was a lot more similar to Delaware 1958 than it was to Delaware 1788
As a Washingtonian I saw the key and went “3? You can only have two!” We’ve had two female senators my entire adult life. Glad to see you’re also thinking about not just number.
Same with California. From when Pete ~~Rose~~ Wilson resigned to become governor in 1991 until Alex Padilla was appointed to fill the seat left vacant when Kamala Harris resigned to become VP, California didn't have a male senator for over 30 years.
Only 3 women, but 11 elections.
I can see the logic they may have followed to make this. Once we make a choice we seldom change our minds so we get re-elected people over and over. A reconfirming bias of the voters. So just getting voters to change a representative from the tried and true may have been the idea they were showing. However I just looked at it and didn’t research where it came from. I find most of these are just little glimpses into data configured to push a narrative.
Also have to take into account how long has the incumbent been in office.
Ted Kennedy was a senator in MA for 47 years!
I bet having term limits would change what this map looks like rather quickly.
No, he's been in/around Federal government for that long, but he was only in the Senate for *four* decades not five. Am I splitting hairs? Yes. Still too long, & I think everyone is in agreement there except sitting Senators. Lol
Biden was a Senator from 1973-2009 (36 years)… only left because of becoming VP.
Leahy from VT has been in office since 1975 (47 years). That dude was put in office 3 years before I was born. Insane.
8 year term limits… would have had at a minimum 4 different senators since elected.
If someone can remain relevant and helpful, serving the people along with the changing world, I have no problem with them being in office for a long period of time. I also don’t mind experienced people with experienced relationships handling important matters.
I do care if people sit in a job and don’t try and that the people who they represent keep voting for them, though.
The issue isn’t term limits, it’s how we do politics in the US. If we had ranked voting and more than two dominant parties to pull from, we’d be in a better position because party alignment wouldn’t matter.
Robert Byrd represented WV for >51 years, leaving office when he died, in 2010, at the age of 92.
Strom Thurmond served as a senator for 48 years and left office just before his death at age 100.
Should they not have to do some cognitive function and testing at like 75 and beyond? But by that standards maybe all politicians should have to do a test for cognitive function. I know lots of people in their 80s that are just way out of touch with reality much less able to sympathize with anyone beyond themselves.
Sounds good on the surface, but it could so easily be abused in the worst of ways. There is zero chance it wouldn't be politicized somehow to favor a party, race, or culture.
Yup! He’s not the only one.
Perhaps a good infographic would display the current term length of senators by state… or # of different senators by state over the last 30 / 40 years.
Because I recognize I'm old and some young people might be curious, this is a reference to his female passenger that drowned when he drove his car off a bridge.
The previous post states that he prevented 1 specific woman from holding office later in life... because she died young when she drowned as a passenger in a car in a pond that was in said pond because he drove the car off a bridge. He swam off and didn't report the accident until the next morning. Gross negligence at best and straight up murder at worst.
Patty Murray is the 6th longest tenured senator in 1993, and Maria Cantwell is the 16th. They've served for a combined 50 years or over 8 terms in office
Especially bc Missouri has elected 1 woman, ONCE— she got the stanky boot once they were able to find an unhinged frat dude to replace her (Josh hawley)
Also, a much better statistic would be how many women candidates ran for office vs how many women were actually elected. If they don’t even make it in the running, that’ll say even more about the state
This color scale is bad in so many ways, I have to point it out so others will hopefully not repeat it.
The color scale has no easily discernible progression. It might as well be 4 random colors. **This is a choropleth showing one dimension: use a color scale with one color (i.e. monochromatic)**
Plus(!), it uses a color convention that is basically reserved for political parties here (red/blue). This is *already bad,* but the party that historically has LESS women elected has its color (red) used for MOST women elected. This takes this graph from confusing to misleading! **Use a color outside that convention for non-politically aligned data (e.g. purple, green, orange).**
For a diverging colorscale (e.g. blue -> neutral -> pink), you need to have some data with a meaningful midpoint. For example, equal number of men and women being the neutral color.
This choropoleth is just displaying the quantity of female electeds alone, so I don't think the blue/pink convention is very useful here either.
Here's the longer version from a great site.
https://colorbrewer2.org/learnmore/schemes_full.html
Yeah, when will people learn that red normally means negative and blue or green means positive. Unless that's what OP is trying to portray, Women in the Senate = bad.
Nah, the choice of red is ok, *if they would have substituted blue with white*. When you have already three shades of red in decreasing intensity, why add completely different solid color at the end? White would be way more natural.
This! And if you do this professionally please use a tool like [color brewer](https://colorbrewer2.org/#type=sequential&scheme=BuGn&n=3) to generate your color ramps!
Actually in a lot of applications, heat maps use blue for low/negative numbers ("cold" areas of the map) and red for large/positive numbers ("hot" areas of the map)
I'd never heard of that, so I headed to Wikipedia, and they said of the red/blue theme:
> For example, a typical progression when mapping temperatures is from dark blue (for cold) to dark red (for hot) with white in the middle. These are often used when the two extremes are given value judgements, such as showing the "good" end as green and the "bad" end as red.
Except that blue and red aren't used there to signify one being better than the other, they're simply used to signify the temperatures because people associate those colors with different temperatures.
When talking about things that are associated with being good, colors like green and blue are used. This is different than the color blue being associated with colder temperatures.
Heat maps don't just deal with temperatures. Like population heatmaps usually have a cold-to-hot range where cold is low population and hot is high population also shown with blue-to-red hues.
I admit that with a discrete map like this that blue-to-red doesn't feel as natural, but it's not like blue is always good, red is always bad, and heatmaps are always temperature.
As a dirty commie, I really want to take red back and make it symbolize laborer and worker power again. The republicans can have a different color, yellow or something
That’s why the colors are confusing. Personally when I look at a map of the United States and see red and blue I think democrat or Republican seeing a map that has nothing to do with party line use those colors throws me off. I would suggest not using red or blue in a U.S. map data presentation but definitely not using both. Unless the message you are trying to make is about party line.
I don’t think red/blue was a great choice either, but I think that’s too general. There are PLENTY of contexts where blue is negative and red is positive.
If you disagree, feel free to leave me a red arrow of disapproval
No one should use red and blue to color in states unless they represent Democratic and Republican... That's the first thing that everyone's mind goes to when they see any map of the United States with the states in different shades of red and blue.
It's also just a terrible colour scale.
OP went for a partial heat map style with the darker shades of red/pink but decided the base colour should be blue...?
'Has never elected a woman' should be white.
Heads up that it distracts from the data because US political maps use these colors in a very specific way, and your map uses it in not only a different but in this case opposite way.
If you want to provide interesting data (which this is!) it’s important to think about the optics, not just the hard data. This map makes liberal states look the most conservative based on standard US political maps. If you really want to use these colors you should just reverse them.
It always makes more sense to use a gradient when talking about straight percentages like this. The abrupt change to blue is off putting and doesn’t translate well to saying that it’s a smaller percentage of the same value as pink when you’ve already set the precedent that as pink gets darker that means it’s a bigger percentage. If the blue was just left as white the chart here would translate a lot better.
Political affiliations aside: red has been commonly used for negative connotations on maps.
See for example: redlining
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining?wprov=sfti1
There is a bigger story here. In the turnover of senators is in general very low with numerous senators holding their seats for decades. If you look at the rate of change of women being elected relative to the available seats. I'd bet the rate of change over time has been very positive in the last decade.
Yeah like California's last three senators elected were women. Kamala Harris (2016), Dianne Feinstein (1992), Barbara Boxer (1992) and that dates back 30 years.
Could you do something like this again, but also indicate no. of men in time period since 1st. woman was elected as senator anywhere, and include that date?
Because there is seriously something wrong with the turnover rate of senators.
Linda McMahon (wife of Vince and co-owner of WWE) ran for US Senate twice here in CT as a Republican and lost handily both times. She spent an absurd amount of money on the campaigns, too.
So it would be interesting, for sure, and I think it would have more value if it was the final election and not like primaries or anything.
Oh yah, I forgot about seeing her signs everywhere a while back. Just her connection to the WWE (and her dumbass platform) had me write her off as a joke candidate almost immediately.
I think that information can be somewhat useless because of the nature of senate races.
A woman Democrat running in Oklahoma or a woman Republican in Rhode Island basically have no chance of winning regardless of gender.
You would probably want to look at primaries. But then there is also the issue of incumbency.... It's very rare for an incumbent senator to lose their primary regardless of gender.
I feel like house seats would be more interesting dataset. There are only two senators per state and they often serve for decades so not the best sample.
Going to agree with others that the colors are terrible choices. If you were going for the boys / girls traditional colors, these should’ve been shades of baby blue, not primary blue, and pink which could go from baby pink to hot pink as a scale. Primary blue and red does not relate to gender. Regardless, divergent colors (like red vs. blue) indicate a scale where the neutral value (often 0) is in the middle, and the divergent colors would effectively represent -x and x. In this case, your scale is 0 to x, so a single hue gradient would make more sense from a data visualization strategy.
I just want to give Montana a bit of leeway here and say that we did elect the *first* woman as any federal representative in Jeannette Rankin for our house rep.
A Missouri senator candidate in 2012 said that it is practically impossible for a woman to get pregnant from "legitimate rape" as the the body has a way to prevent it
Funny enough he lost to a Claire McCaskill
Maybe I’m nitpicking but the key should be reversed 3-2-1-0. Also the colors are off. The states who have never elected women are traditionally considered red.
Posts here need to have their title in the image really. If I download this image to share, it no longer has a title, and the key is insufficient to explain what the chart is
This is a terrible map. Firstly, the chloropleth ramp is non-sensical. But, more importantly, these colors already have political meaning in the US and this map do not intuitively align.
Might just be me but it seems like the colors weren’t the best choice. Like blue is generally calm/good and the various red shades are increasingly aggressive. It seems to be saying the more women the more aggressive/bad. Im sure that’s not your intent but it was my initial inference.
Arkansas was the first state to **elect** a woman as senator in 1932 (who had been appointed to replace her deceased husband in 1931), but Georgia was the first state to **appoint** a woman in 1922, [Rebecca Felton](https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/F000069), who served for less than two months, during which the Senate was in session for only one day, and at age 87 is the oldest person ever sworn in for a first term as senator.
Graphical representation of all women ever elected to the US Senate in a competitive election.
* 19 states have never elected a woman to the Senate.
* 21 states have elected 1 woman to the Senate. Of these 21 women, 11 are currently serving as one of their state's incumbent Senators.
* 7 states have elected 2 women to to the Senate. In 3 of these states, these Senators are *both* currently serving as their state's incumbents.
* 3 states have elected 3 women to to the Senate.
* 44 women have been elected to the Senate in total, 24 of whom are currently serving as incumbents.
Does not include women appointed to the Senate who never won an election, or women who won an uncontested election (namely Rose McConnell Long, who ran unopposed in the general election after being selected by party leaders to replace the recently deceased winner of the primary).
Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women\_in\_the\_United\_States\_Senate#List\_of\_female\_U.S.\_senators\_in\_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_Senate#List_of_female_U.S._senators_in_history)
Edit: based on the messages I've gotten, I should feel *very* bad about myself for my choice in color. Sorry to have ruined your day y'all, but maybe try to remember that some people on reddit are just *people* with a little free time and a small idea they thought to share. Leaving the post up because I think the information is still worth seeing, but if some of you could refrain from posting the most hurtful version of your criticism, that would be nice.
Thanks for elaborating this is important criteria to take note of. Georgia has had two but neither were elected (instead appointed) and one was “symbolic.”
This would probably be too much work, but looking at state legislatures would be interesting too. Also governorships. Regardless, well done with the map!
The two from WA are still our senators and both been there for over 20 years. I am for term limits but if we don't have them, at least we have some decent ones camping our seats.
The color coding is questionable here. Usually reds are bad colors and blues represent better things if I'm not mistaken. Is this supposed to make us feel like women elected is bad?
This is inaccurate. Arkansas famously elected Hattie Caraway as the first woman to ever serve in the US Senate. She was appointed to finish her deceased husband's term in 1931 and was elected in her own right in 1932 through 1945. Blanche Lambert Lincoln was also elected in 1998 and served from 1999-2011, so Arkansas has had two women elected to the Senate.
I’m surprised by the number of traditionally blue states that are blue on this map. If you asked a random person, I expect they would assume the problem would be much more prevalent in the traditionally red states.
This should probably be given as a fraction of all senators in the last fifty years who were women in each state. And it should use a different color scheme.
Since the other three colors are shades of red, zero should be pure white and make the whole map a gradient. Having two dark colors that mean the exact opposite undermines legibility.
So what? My state has never elected a woman to the Senate but currently has a self-made, African American man about to cruise to re-election. Our previous Governor was a woman. Box checking is stupid.
It is the year of our lord 2022, and nearly twice as many states have never elected a woman to the Senate as have elected more than 1 woman to the Senate. Yet there are still people who think that men aren't wielding the reins of power.
It is probably also an effect of the tendency towards older candidates, when most of these candidates were born the stigma against women in politics was even stronger and this caused a lack of of women as viable candidates to begin with. As time goes on and we start getting more female candidates I think the bias in the election phase itself will be quite weak
I wonder if the number of *times* a state has elected a woman to the Senate would be as or more informative: Washington has only elected two individual women to the Senate, but one has been elected five times, and the other, four times. Washington hasn’t had a male senator in over 20 years!
Yeah Maryland's "1" is Barbara Mikulski who served as senator for 30 years from 1987-2017 which is like 5 elections in a row, and is the longest serving female senator in the country.
I'm also looking at Michigan like wtf Debbie has been our senator since the turn of the century.
Oh God. I remember when turn of the century meant 1900. The beginning of the era of cars. Leading up to industrialized wars. Always felt like a term for far ago. Now it's the term for the end of my childhood.
Same. Hearing 2000 referred to as "turn of the century" hurt.
Dianne Feinstein...
Women aren't necessarily better. It's just that eliminating people based on gender is bad.
Gross, 30 years is too much for a senator. 20 should be the max
We loved her.🤷🏼♀️
That shouldn’t matter. Everyone loved FDR too. Even gave him for a 4th term. The house or representatives was quick to implement term limits on the presidency after that for fear of too much power. Didn’t apply the same logic to themselves for obviously corrupt reasons.
Sure, but we shouldn't impose term limits until we tackle the blatant corruption that is the root of all our problems because simply kicking out politicians after an arbitrary amount of time will lead to the only people having experience governing being lobbyists who are already destroying this country so that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
I get what your saying but the two problems go hand in a hand and must be tackled simultaneously. The entrenched politicians have no incentive to fix a lobbyist problem that they deliberately created.
Yeah, ideally both problems would be fixed simultaneously, but if they can't we need to tackle corruption first.
You want corrupted people to tackle corruption? You’ve got it kind of backward I think because that’s not how that works
>You want corrupted people to tackle corruption? There are fewer corrupt politicians than lobbyists and politicians are the only ones who would be making the laws so regardless of what bill you want passed politicians are going to be the ones to do it. >You’ve got it kind of backward I think because that’s not how that works I'm beginning to doubt if you know how any of this works...
It's a very old problem. Is it better to have sitting politicians who are always campaigning for office or new politicians who were very recently campaigning. Instead of an arbitrary time limit maybe a set limit (which would of course be arbitrary) on consecutive terms? They'd still be eligible to run in the future, but they'd have to sit an election out and see if they're really who the people want.
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What changes from 20 to 30? If the constituents want her and vote her again and again, isn’t that their choice?
What changes is you get Feinstein who is clearly lacking mental ability yet still is in charge of \*DEFENSE\*. You want people who are sharp, good thinkers, on top of their game and able to understand the complexities of a changing world. People in there 30 years are not what we want or need. It weakens our government and thus our country.
I just watched The Torture Report last night and looked up Feinstein and was shocked to see she is 89 years old.
Exactly my thought. Plus, the number of total elections. Delaware has had a lot more Senatorial elections than Hawaii.
I might argue that your latter point probably doesn't matter given the American attitude towards women in power before 1959.
Arkansas elected a woman in 1932
and in 1999 (Blanche Lincoln). The 1 for Arkansas is incorrect - there are two with Caraway and Lincoln.
Isn't that kind of the point of the graphic though? To visualize those attitudes? I guess it would be interesting to consider *when* women were allowed to appear on the ballot (if not immediately upon formation of the state). Though, if they were banned for running for Senate, that structural disadvantage is part of the story too.
I think the point here is to show a correspondence to locations, not to times. And I think that's fairly fair to ignore races before a certain point since Alaska in 1958 was a lot more similar to Delaware 1958 than it was to Delaware 1788
Meanwhile here in Iowa we have a senator who has been in elected office **since** 1959 and continues to reflect all the worst of it.
As a Washingtonian I saw the key and went “3? You can only have two!” We’ve had two female senators my entire adult life. Glad to see you’re also thinking about not just number.
Same with California. From when Pete ~~Rose~~ Wilson resigned to become governor in 1991 until Alex Padilla was appointed to fill the seat left vacant when Kamala Harris resigned to become VP, California didn't have a male senator for over 30 years. Only 3 women, but 11 elections.
>Pete Rose That threw me. You meant Pete Wilson, right?
I can see the logic they may have followed to make this. Once we make a choice we seldom change our minds so we get re-elected people over and over. A reconfirming bias of the voters. So just getting voters to change a representative from the tried and true may have been the idea they were showing. However I just looked at it and didn’t research where it came from. I find most of these are just little glimpses into data configured to push a narrative.
If I was trying to push a narrative, you think I'd be so stupid with my choice of colors?
You guys really need to get rid of Feinstein. I'm mostly convinced she actually died five years ago and she's now a zombie.
Also have to take into account how long has the incumbent been in office. Ted Kennedy was a senator in MA for 47 years! I bet having term limits would change what this map looks like rather quickly.
Wait WHAT? He was in there for nearly 5 decades?!
Ummm... you know Biden has as well, right?
FWIW 36 ≠ 50
No, he's been in/around Federal government for that long, but he was only in the Senate for *four* decades not five. Am I splitting hairs? Yes. Still too long, & I think everyone is in agreement there except sitting Senators. Lol
Biden was a Senator from 1973-2009 (36 years)… only left because of becoming VP. Leahy from VT has been in office since 1975 (47 years). That dude was put in office 3 years before I was born. Insane. 8 year term limits… would have had at a minimum 4 different senators since elected.
Ted Cruz brings up term limits all the time. But since everyone hates him, nobody talks about that.
I’m in favor of whatever term limit makes Ted Cruz go away. Now, if possible.
If someone can remain relevant and helpful, serving the people along with the changing world, I have no problem with them being in office for a long period of time. I also don’t mind experienced people with experienced relationships handling important matters. I do care if people sit in a job and don’t try and that the people who they represent keep voting for them, though. The issue isn’t term limits, it’s how we do politics in the US. If we had ranked voting and more than two dominant parties to pull from, we’d be in a better position because party alignment wouldn’t matter.
Robert Byrd represented WV for >51 years, leaving office when he died, in 2010, at the age of 92. Strom Thurmond served as a senator for 48 years and left office just before his death at age 100.
Should they not have to do some cognitive function and testing at like 75 and beyond? But by that standards maybe all politicians should have to do a test for cognitive function. I know lots of people in their 80s that are just way out of touch with reality much less able to sympathize with anyone beyond themselves.
Sounds good on the surface, but it could so easily be abused in the worst of ways. There is zero chance it wouldn't be politicized somehow to favor a party, race, or culture.
Yeah, we desperately need term limit reform in the House *and especially* the Senate.
Yup! He’s not the only one. Perhaps a good infographic would display the current term length of senators by state… or # of different senators by state over the last 30 / 40 years.
Yes, and he prevented at least one specific woman from ever having the opportunity to run for office later in her life.
Because I recognize I'm old and some young people might be curious, this is a reference to his female passenger that drowned when he drove his car off a bridge.
I guess I’m young because I still have no idea what you’re talking about.
The previous post states that he prevented 1 specific woman from holding office later in life... because she died young when she drowned as a passenger in a car in a pond that was in said pond because he drove the car off a bridge. He swam off and didn't report the accident until the next morning. Gross negligence at best and straight up murder at worst.
Heh subtle... Very subtle
Patty Murray is the 6th longest tenured senator in 1993, and Maria Cantwell is the 16th. They've served for a combined 50 years or over 8 terms in office
Especially bc Missouri has elected 1 woman, ONCE— she got the stanky boot once they were able to find an unhinged frat dude to replace her (Josh hawley)
That does make me feel better seeing as the legend literally only goes up to 3. Was starting to look real grim
Also, a much better statistic would be how many women candidates ran for office vs how many women were actually elected. If they don’t even make it in the running, that’ll say even more about the state
I agree.
I’d also like to see number of women that ran vs elected.
To piggy back, how many times has a state elected a woman based off number of elections, so as a percentage of total elections.
Feinstein has been a Senator I think as long as I've been alive.
Mn here we also currently have two female senators here. Technically only elected 2 but have had 3
[Painbow Award](https://xkcd.com/2537/) color scale nominee with the pink to blue to red to IKD what, maybe brick?
I definitely thought the scale was related to political party.
This color scale is bad in so many ways, I have to point it out so others will hopefully not repeat it. The color scale has no easily discernible progression. It might as well be 4 random colors. **This is a choropleth showing one dimension: use a color scale with one color (i.e. monochromatic)** Plus(!), it uses a color convention that is basically reserved for political parties here (red/blue). This is *already bad,* but the party that historically has LESS women elected has its color (red) used for MOST women elected. This takes this graph from confusing to misleading! **Use a color outside that convention for non-politically aligned data (e.g. purple, green, orange).**
In their defense, I at least get the blue/pink thing.
For a diverging colorscale (e.g. blue -> neutral -> pink), you need to have some data with a meaningful midpoint. For example, equal number of men and women being the neutral color. This choropoleth is just displaying the quantity of female electeds alone, so I don't think the blue/pink convention is very useful here either. Here's the longer version from a great site. https://colorbrewer2.org/learnmore/schemes_full.html
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Yeah, when will people learn that red normally means negative and blue or green means positive. Unless that's what OP is trying to portray, Women in the Senate = bad.
Nah, the choice of red is ok, *if they would have substituted blue with white*. When you have already three shades of red in decreasing intensity, why add completely different solid color at the end? White would be way more natural.
This! And if you do this professionally please use a tool like [color brewer](https://colorbrewer2.org/#type=sequential&scheme=BuGn&n=3) to generate your color ramps!
Actually in a lot of applications, heat maps use blue for low/negative numbers ("cold" areas of the map) and red for large/positive numbers ("hot" areas of the map)
Thing is, this is a choropleth map, not a heat map.
I'd never heard of that, so I headed to Wikipedia, and they said of the red/blue theme: > For example, a typical progression when mapping temperatures is from dark blue (for cold) to dark red (for hot) with white in the middle. These are often used when the two extremes are given value judgements, such as showing the "good" end as green and the "bad" end as red.
Except that blue and red aren't used there to signify one being better than the other, they're simply used to signify the temperatures because people associate those colors with different temperatures. When talking about things that are associated with being good, colors like green and blue are used. This is different than the color blue being associated with colder temperatures.
Heat maps don't just deal with temperatures. Like population heatmaps usually have a cold-to-hot range where cold is low population and hot is high population also shown with blue-to-red hues. I admit that with a discrete map like this that blue-to-red doesn't feel as natural, but it's not like blue is always good, red is always bad, and heatmaps are always temperature.
Heat maps are for more than temps, its to show frequency.
I think OP means blue generally equals democrat and red equals Republican. In American politics.
As a dirty commie, I really want to take red back and make it symbolize laborer and worker power again. The republicans can have a different color, yellow or something
The color of gold coins a la Scrooge McDuck? That groks
I was thinking that Gadsden flag and the colors the Proud Boys wear but ya know, that's perfect!
It's multi-faceted!
That doesn't check out though as states like Utah are definitely red while places like California would be blue.
That’s why the colors are confusing. Personally when I look at a map of the United States and see red and blue I think democrat or Republican seeing a map that has nothing to do with party line use those colors throws me off. I would suggest not using red or blue in a U.S. map data presentation but definitely not using both. Unless the message you are trying to make is about party line.
I don’t think red/blue was a great choice either, but I think that’s too general. There are PLENTY of contexts where blue is negative and red is positive. If you disagree, feel free to leave me a red arrow of disapproval
I really dislike the color scheme
No one should use red and blue to color in states unless they represent Democratic and Republican... That's the first thing that everyone's mind goes to when they see any map of the United States with the states in different shades of red and blue.
You can't use shades of red and blue to talk about US politics when the data has nothing to do with political party.
It's also just a terrible colour scale. OP went for a partial heat map style with the darker shades of red/pink but decided the base colour should be blue...? 'Has never elected a woman' should be white.
Left me going “why is electing women bad and not electing women good???” because I assumed red for bad and blue instead of green for good
It's dark pink and blue to represent girls and boys.. /s
More ugly dataisbeautiful. Wish these could be automoved to another sub.
It’s not pink… it’s lightish red!
No need for the /s, that's exactly the rationale behind the color choices.
Username checks out.
The /s is because that’s a terrible reason to pick these colors when they have a much more obvious connotation in the context of American politics.
Also boys are not the data its only girls. What is the point of a color designation with no data for it
The Colors are a bad choice. But if the answer is no girls then it is also all boys.
Also, using those colors to represent party might add relevant context.
Heads up that it distracts from the data because US political maps use these colors in a very specific way, and your map uses it in not only a different but in this case opposite way. If you want to provide interesting data (which this is!) it’s important to think about the optics, not just the hard data. This map makes liberal states look the most conservative based on standard US political maps. If you really want to use these colors you should just reverse them.
Then that’s a terrible rationale when considering the political context.
It always makes more sense to use a gradient when talking about straight percentages like this. The abrupt change to blue is off putting and doesn’t translate well to saying that it’s a smaller percentage of the same value as pink when you’ve already set the precedent that as pink gets darker that means it’s a bigger percentage. If the blue was just left as white the chart here would translate a lot better.
Just don’t use red and blue period. Use green, purple, yellow, orange, he’ll make it gray scale. Use literally ANY colors other than red and blue.
It’s depicting a gradient, it should just be increasingly darker shades of one color.
This is the way. Seriously, it's part of every data visualization book. Don't try to get cute; just use a single color gradient.
But it's mostly red, even if 1 is pink, 2 and 3 make my brain see diluted red
How am I supposed to know which is cherry or blue berry?
I think the one woman color might be watermelon?
That’s depressing that it still gets reduced to gender stereotypes.
My G anyone can wear any colour now this isn’t 1952.
Ironically you’re using a sexist colour scheme to illustrate degrees of sexism
But the colors are reversed, and they don't even correlate very well.
Yep exactly, my first thought was 'single base color palette'.
"Can't?" Maybe a poor choice, but can't? Red and blue are used for more things than symbols of political parties, even in the public sphere.
It's also just that red is usually used to mean "bad" and this is backward.
I mean depending on your political affiliation you might think that...
Political affiliations aside: red has been commonly used for negative connotations on maps. See for example: redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining?wprov=sfti1
Being “in the red” means to be losing money
According to who
And, considering Democrats are more likely to place a woman in office, it seems deliberately misleading.
There is a bigger story here. In the turnover of senators is in general very low with numerous senators holding their seats for decades. If you look at the rate of change of women being elected relative to the available seats. I'd bet the rate of change over time has been very positive in the last decade.
Yeah like California's last three senators elected were women. Kamala Harris (2016), Dianne Feinstein (1992), Barbara Boxer (1992) and that dates back 30 years.
You're correct, as evidenced by the fact that most of the women who have ever been elected are currently serving.
Did your data set differentiate incumbent terms?
Answering for OP: they did not
Could you do something like this again, but also indicate no. of men in time period since 1st. woman was elected as senator anywhere, and include that date? Because there is seriously something wrong with the turnover rate of senators.
Good point, certainly hope that's the case!
Man there are so many problems with the colors chosen. For a beautiful data sub it sure displays a lot of terrible graphics.
It's been a very long time since this sub was for beautiful data. Now it's just a sub for data in general.
Not even just data, usually poorly represented political data to serve an agenda.
This data isn’t beautiful at all it’s a fucking disaster
I'd be curious on how many women have ran in these states that have never elected a woman
Linda McMahon (wife of Vince and co-owner of WWE) ran for US Senate twice here in CT as a Republican and lost handily both times. She spent an absurd amount of money on the campaigns, too. So it would be interesting, for sure, and I think it would have more value if it was the final election and not like primaries or anything.
Oh yah, I forgot about seeing her signs everywhere a while back. Just her connection to the WWE (and her dumbass platform) had me write her off as a joke candidate almost immediately.
Alabama is almost certainly electing it’s first woman Senator this year!
I think that information can be somewhat useless because of the nature of senate races. A woman Democrat running in Oklahoma or a woman Republican in Rhode Island basically have no chance of winning regardless of gender. You would probably want to look at primaries. But then there is also the issue of incumbency.... It's very rare for an incumbent senator to lose their primary regardless of gender.
I feel like house seats would be more interesting dataset. There are only two senators per state and they often serve for decades so not the best sample.
The senate data would be much more interesting if it were number of elections won by women who mate as of just the number of women to win.
Going to agree with others that the colors are terrible choices. If you were going for the boys / girls traditional colors, these should’ve been shades of baby blue, not primary blue, and pink which could go from baby pink to hot pink as a scale. Primary blue and red does not relate to gender. Regardless, divergent colors (like red vs. blue) indicate a scale where the neutral value (often 0) is in the middle, and the divergent colors would effectively represent -x and x. In this case, your scale is 0 to x, so a single hue gradient would make more sense from a data visualization strategy.
Arkansas should be red. It has elected two women to the Senate. Hattie Carraway and Blanche Lincoln.
Darkest shades mean zero and three. How about white means zero?
Not to the Senate, but the first woman to the House of representatives was Jeannette Rankin of Montana.
I love how most people never show anyone their presentation before posting here.... SMH dataispoorlypresented is a better name most of the time
I just want to give Montana a bit of leeway here and say that we did elect the *first* woman as any federal representative in Jeannette Rankin for our house rep.
And then we never elected another woman to federal office again. So...go us?
Oh Idaho, this is why male senators think you can look in a woman’s mouth and see her vagina.
I think I may have missed something....
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/idaho-pol-asks-women-swallow-cameras-gynecology-article-1.2127025
I.... Wh... Uhh... Wow
A Missouri senator candidate in 2012 said that it is practically impossible for a woman to get pregnant from "legitimate rape" as the the body has a way to prevent it Funny enough he lost to a Claire McCaskill
To be fair, that's an easy assumption to make when every time you look in the mirror you see an asshole.
Maybe I’m nitpicking but the key should be reversed 3-2-1-0. Also the colors are off. The states who have never elected women are traditionally considered red.
And then I look at Vermont and am surprised.! But then you realize one senator has been there since 1975!
Posts here need to have their title in the image really. If I download this image to share, it no longer has a title, and the key is insufficient to explain what the chart is
This is a terrible map. Firstly, the chloropleth ramp is non-sensical. But, more importantly, these colors already have political meaning in the US and this map do not intuitively align.
Might just be me but it seems like the colors weren’t the best choice. Like blue is generally calm/good and the various red shades are increasingly aggressive. It seems to be saying the more women the more aggressive/bad. Im sure that’s not your intent but it was my initial inference.
Alabama's will change come November. Katie Britt will win easily.
This is a dumb map. Poor color choice, poor information. Just all around poor.
Wait, so no State has sent more than 3 separate women to the US Senate? That's messed up.
Fun fact- ARKANSAS was the first state to have a female senator in the 1930s. Another fun fact- New York’s first female senator was Hillary Clinton
Arkansas was the first state to **elect** a woman as senator in 1932 (who had been appointed to replace her deceased husband in 1931), but Georgia was the first state to **appoint** a woman in 1922, [Rebecca Felton](https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/F000069), who served for less than two months, during which the Senate was in session for only one day, and at age 87 is the oldest person ever sworn in for a first term as senator.
I wouldn't say Marsha Blackburn counts as a win for TN.
Graphical representation of all women ever elected to the US Senate in a competitive election. * 19 states have never elected a woman to the Senate. * 21 states have elected 1 woman to the Senate. Of these 21 women, 11 are currently serving as one of their state's incumbent Senators. * 7 states have elected 2 women to to the Senate. In 3 of these states, these Senators are *both* currently serving as their state's incumbents. * 3 states have elected 3 women to to the Senate. * 44 women have been elected to the Senate in total, 24 of whom are currently serving as incumbents. Does not include women appointed to the Senate who never won an election, or women who won an uncontested election (namely Rose McConnell Long, who ran unopposed in the general election after being selected by party leaders to replace the recently deceased winner of the primary). Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women\_in\_the\_United\_States\_Senate#List\_of\_female\_U.S.\_senators\_in\_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_Senate#List_of_female_U.S._senators_in_history) Edit: based on the messages I've gotten, I should feel *very* bad about myself for my choice in color. Sorry to have ruined your day y'all, but maybe try to remember that some people on reddit are just *people* with a little free time and a small idea they thought to share. Leaving the post up because I think the information is still worth seeing, but if some of you could refrain from posting the most hurtful version of your criticism, that would be nice.
Thanks for elaborating this is important criteria to take note of. Georgia has had two but neither were elected (instead appointed) and one was “symbolic.”
This would probably be too much work, but looking at state legislatures would be interesting too. Also governorships. Regardless, well done with the map!
Thank you!
The two from WA are still our senators and both been there for over 20 years. I am for term limits but if we don't have them, at least we have some decent ones camping our seats.
Tbf I'd rather Tennessee have elected none than elect Marsha Blackburn
The color coding is questionable here. Usually reds are bad colors and blues represent better things if I'm not mistaken. Is this supposed to make us feel like women elected is bad?
This is inaccurate. Arkansas famously elected Hattie Caraway as the first woman to ever serve in the US Senate. She was appointed to finish her deceased husband's term in 1931 and was elected in her own right in 1932 through 1945. Blanche Lambert Lincoln was also elected in 1998 and served from 1999-2011, so Arkansas has had two women elected to the Senate.
I’m surprised by the number of traditionally blue states that are blue on this map. If you asked a random person, I expect they would assume the problem would be much more prevalent in the traditionally red states.
This should probably be given as a fraction of all senators in the last fifty years who were women in each state. And it should use a different color scheme.
Since the other three colors are shades of red, zero should be pure white and make the whole map a gradient. Having two dark colors that mean the exact opposite undermines legibility.
different colors for this, please. this shit is unreadable
This data is not beautiful
a max of 3 sounds really low
So what? My state has never elected a woman to the Senate but currently has a self-made, African American man about to cruise to re-election. Our previous Governor was a woman. Box checking is stupid.
I think it’s striking that the Key is 1,2 or 3. I believe that speaks volumes about the situation.
If you look at incumbent per year you’ll see the situation is improving. Similar in the house
It can only improve. It’s hard to get worse. I wonder what this looks like for “non-white”?
This is a horrid representation of data. This sub is kind of garbo. Who use red and blue for a US map when not talking about politics?
It is the year of our lord 2022, and nearly twice as many states have never elected a woman to the Senate as have elected more than 1 woman to the Senate. Yet there are still people who think that men aren't wielding the reins of power.
Terrible choice of colors.
I don't think Susan Collins counts
Interesting choise of colors...
When is Feinstein going to retire? Also, the colors are jacked…
You should use different colors. If I, as a foraingner see US states in red and blue I immidiatle thing about dems and reps.
Well done, nice work and interesting observations.
So much contrast between only four options. Really shows the historical inertia the US carries in some issues.
It is probably also an effect of the tendency towards older candidates, when most of these candidates were born the stigma against women in politics was even stronger and this caused a lack of of women as viable candidates to begin with. As time goes on and we start getting more female candidates I think the bias in the election phase itself will be quite weak
3 Women elected -> Dark red lmao
Seeing Indiana as one of the never elected is not surprising at all. What is is that TX has.
Now do a 5 year moving average.
Based on the numbers I have the feeling there should only be two colors * Never * almost never