I rewrote this post 4 times, in an effort to give it a calm and professional tone. And then I thought “Ah fuck it, this is my blog and I can say whatever I want.” I’m writing this post because I just listened to an interview about data visualization. It took place among 4 men who were positioned around the globe and lasted over an hour. In that time, I didn’t hear them mention even one woman. In the references they posted, only men were listed. This post is to point attention to the awesome women in data visualization, not just out there kicking ass, but going the extra distance to show others how its done.
Ann Emery How-to instructions on dataviz best practices, coauthor of the Data Visualization Checklist, and video guides on Excel formulas
Angela Zoss So happy someone pointed me to this blog
Anya A’Hearn Screenshots of how to pull together an array of tools to create powerful viz
Cole Nussbaumer Preaching the best practices, right within Excel, with downloadable template to boot
Lynn Cherny She codes but her blog posts are not so much about that, rather they are excellent, thoughtful reads, including this one on starting to freelance your data viz skills
Tiffany Farrant Considerate analysis of dataviz and a monthly roundup of the cool stuff in the field, working in Illustrator
Jen Stirrup Writing about big data, business intelligence, and SQL (so I don’t understand half of it but the other half is awesome)
Caroline Ziemkiewicz Not a blogger, but published a super important paper with Robert Kosara
Hillary Mason What you can do with code
Rachel Binx Oh look at that coding skill!
Maral Pourkazemi Gorgeous infographics, full of graphs and none of that useless bullshit
Anna Powell-Smith She’s the one that made that awesome viz on dress sizes that made me want to buy a sewing machine
Uta Hinrichs Data + art in an understandable and accessible way
Giorgia Lupi Slides and video for some talks available
Petra Isenberg Publishing research on dataviz. Be still my heart.
Katy Borner Teaching and publishing, especially on maps and networks & leading IVMOOC
Cynthia Brewer Among other things, the brains behind my favorite site, ColorBrewer
Michelle Borkin Of that famous research study on what makes a viz memorable, plus other stuff of course
Sheelagh Carpendale Rocking it out at the University of Calgary
Miriah Meyer Check the qualitative study on how designers design with data
Cyndey Neilsen Using dataviz to understand genomics & saving the freakin world
Chrys Wu What isn’t she doing?
Jessica Hullman Speaking on design trade-offs in this cool video
That’s more than 50 females in dataviz. You can see them all in my Twitter list. And I’m sure there are many more I have missed. And if we start looking at related fields, like all the women in this geoviz list, or amazing people like my friend Kylie Hutchinson, who address dataviz in broader contexts, the list becomes massive. Which is why it’s increasingly frustrating that we are repeatedly left out of the old boys club.
So GOOD LORD how is it 2014 and one of my primary fields is so male-dominated that I still have to bring attention to badass females??? One day, I’m going to be able to delete this post because it will be obsolete.
