The World We Live In #4: Marriage Ages

It is time for women to stop being politely angry (Leymah Gbowee, Nobel Prize Peace Winner)

Sometimes very simple plots give insight into we live in a world of differences. This plot shows the mean age at marriage for men and women across countries:

Marriage Ages

Being a woman in some countries of this world must be a hard experience:

#Singulate mean age at marriage: http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=GenderStat&f=inID%3a20
#Population: http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=SOWC&f=inID%3a105
require("sqldf")
require("ggplot2")
setwd("YOUR WORKING DIRECTORY HERE")
mar=read.csv("UNdata_Export_20150309_171525152.csv", nrows=321, header=T, row.names=NULL)
pop=read.csv("UNdata_Export_20150309_172046384.csv", nrows=999, header=T, row.names=NULL)
colnames(mar)[1]="Country"
colnames(pop)[1]="Country"
data=sqldf("SELECT
  a.Country,
  a.Value as Pop,
  b.Value as Female,
  c.Value as Male
FROM
  pop a INNER JOIN mar b
  ON (a.Country=b.Country AND b.Subgroup='Female') INNER JOIN mar c
  ON (a.Country=c.Country AND c.Subgroup='Male')
WHERE a.Subgroup = 'Total'")
opts=theme(
  panel.background = element_rect(fill="gray98"),
  panel.border = element_rect(colour="black", fill=NA),
  axis.line = element_line(size = 0.5, colour = "black"),
  axis.ticks = element_line(colour="black"),
  panel.grid.major = element_line(colour="gray75", linetype = 2),
  panel.grid.minor = element_blank(),
  axis.text = element_text(colour="gray25", size=15),
  axis.title = element_text(size=18, colour="gray10"),
  legend.key = element_blank(),
  legend.position = "none",
  legend.background = element_blank(),
  plot.title = element_text(size = 40, colour="gray10"))
ggplot(data, aes(x=Female, y=Male, size=log(Pop), label=Country), guide=FALSE)+
  geom_point(colour="white", fill="chartreuse3", shape=21, alpha=.55)+
  scale_size_continuous(range=c(2,36))+
  scale_x_continuous(limits=c(16,36), breaks=seq(16, 36, by = 2), expand = c(0, 0))+
  scale_y_continuous(limits=c(16,36), breaks=seq(16, 36, by = 2), expand = c(0, 0))+
  geom_abline(intercept = 0, slope = 1, colour = "gray10", linetype=2)+
  labs(title="The World We Live In #4: Marriage Ages",
       x="Females mean age at marriage",
       y="Males mean age at marriage")+
  geom_text(data=subset(data, abs(Female-Male)>7), size=5.5, colour="gray25", hjust=0, vjust=0)+
  geom_text(data=subset(data, Female>=32|Female<=18), size=5.5, colour="gray25", hjust=0, vjust=0)+
  geom_text(aes(24, 17), colour="gray25", hjust=0, label="Source: United Nations (size of bubble depending on population)", size=5)+opts

3 thoughts on “The World We Live In #4: Marriage Ages

  1. I feel that this graph is problematic. This particular graph is hiding most of the reality behind its measure of center. There is no sense of the underlying distributions; their spread, their modality, the structure of co-association.

    Each country will tend to sprawl across the entire graph. Resolving that is tricky.
    We need some creative ideas…

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