I have several populations (of people, actually) which vary in size (from 5 to 6000). I would like to visualize the ratio of women vs. men in each of them so that they can be compared. I will get, for instance
- case 1: 20% of women, size of the population: 6000
- case 2: 20% of women, size of the population: 5
- case 3: …
- …
Both percentages in the first cases are the same but a change of one person in each of the populations obviously changes percentages in a vastly different proportion.
Should I take that into account when presenting the data? I am working on a whole population, not samples, so I would tend to say no. I also have a gut feeling that the differences in the population size should still be accounted in some way.
What I am trying to achieve at the end is the ability to state "all cases are similar" or "case 15 is significantly different" – again with the constraint of wildly varying population sizes.
Best Answer
You could present the actual population size using an axis label on any simple display (e.g. bar chart) of women/men.
A quite different plot would just be #women versus #men; the sex ratios would then be different slopes. Provided all values are positive, logarithmic scale might help. On logarithmic scale, lines with the same ratio #women/#men or equivalently the same fraction of women plot as parallel. An audience naive or nervous about logarithmic scale might be encouraged by seeing raw and log scale side by side.