The brief from CNN’s editorial team was deceptively simple: visualise the global gender gap in political power, in a way that worked for online article embedding, in print, and as a standalone shareable graphic. The dataset combined the IPU’s Women in Parliament rankings with then-current cabinet composition figures and a list of head-of-state appointments.
The final piece organised the data in three tiers — heads of state, cabinet seats, parliamentary seats — with a colour-graded world map as the anchor. A small-multiples grid below sorted countries by parliamentary representation, highlighting the leaders (Rwanda, Sweden, the Netherlands at the time) and trailing democracies that, on this metric, looked very different from their global self-image.
What worked editorially
- The three-tier structure let CNN cite a single statistic on air (“only 7 sitting heads of state are women”) while the deeper tiers held up under scrutiny in print.
- Colour grading the world map was deliberately desaturated — the story was the gap, not the visual punch.
- Country labels used the country’s own short-form name in English to keep readers oriented when the map was reproduced at small sizes.
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