This was the ques­tion my disser­ta­tion ended up answer­ing. It wasn’t neces­sar­ily the ques­tion I star­ted with, but hey, that’s science. Or some­thing like it.

The answer is (depend­ing on the type of infographic):

• A man
• of above aver­age numeracy
• with a doctoral-level degree
• between 45 and 54 years old.

Apart from this singu­larly unhelp­ful cari­ca­ture, this is what else I found.

1. If you want to be clear, use writ­ten percentages.

Not ratios. Certainly not graph­ics. If you have a number that can be expressed as a percent­age, do that. They came away as by far the most clearly under­stood means of repres­ent­a­tion in this exper­i­ment. 77% of the time, where a percent­age was the correct answer, you lovely people answered correctly. For graph­ics, you only answered correctly 69% of the time.

69% isn’t that bad, you might say, and no, it’s not. So I might recom­mend that if you are using graph­ics (and who does­n’t, these days), then perhaps you should back them up with other figures so people know what they’re look­ing at. The evid­ence? When the ques­tion asked my survey parti­cipants to compare a graphic with another graphic, they only got the answer right 63% of the time.

This is, of course, if you want to appeal to both genders. If you just want to appeal to men, use ratios. They got them right 82% of the time.

2. Girls can’t do maths (until they get a doctorate)

I feel terrible saying this. Especially as I’m a girl who hasn’t got a doctor­ate. Who really likes maths. Even if I’m not very good at it.

It was genu­inely the most surpris­ing result I had and one that I feel needs imme­di­ate atten­tion because girls maths teach­ing must be completely messed up. There is a small amount of encour­age­ment in that ladies over the age of 45 seem worst affected, but that does­n’t mean the rest of us aren’t in trouble.

Across the board, regard­less of any of the vari­ables meas­ured — numer­acy levels, educa­tion, age — girls doing the test never got a look in. They consist­ently answered more ques­tions incor­rectly. For ques­tions involving graph­ics, women got 66% right. Men got 75%. For ratios, women got 68% correct, for men it was 82%. The only one close was percent­ages — 76% for women compared with 80% for men.

Sadly my survey wasn’t detailed enough to get at any more useful nuggets of inform­a­tion — like which girls had taken maths at A‑level and beyond, so I’m not able to pry any further into this with my results alone. But can some­body else do this? Please? It needs more research, as people like to say.

3. Having qual­i­fic­a­tions does­n’t make a blind bit of differ­ence (unless you’re a doctor)

The results say that people who didn’t go to univer­sity, under­gradu­ates and masters degree students have essen­tially no differ­ences when it comes to the math­em­at­ical under­stand­ing needed to prop­erly inter­pret these kinds of graph­ics. The number of correct answers for people with any of these levels of qual­i­fic­a­tion hovers around the 73% mark.

Having a doctor­ate on the other­hand, does. Understanding posit­ively leaps to the dizzy­ing height of 82%. It even levels the play­ing fields for women. How about that?

Turn to page 2 for the boring science-ish bits and access to the data.

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Corinne Pritchard

Information Designer at Simply Understand

I believe design and design­ers can and should make the world a better place. I love design­ing things that help people under­stand complex ideas.

Latest posts by Corinne Pritchard (see all)

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