The World Bank Group works in every major area of development to reduce poverty and increase shared prosperity around the globe. Achieving these objectives requires a concentrated effort to advance gender equality — one of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

To this end, the World Bank’s Development Data and Gender Groups maintain one of the largest collections of sex-disaggregated specific data focused on women’s issues and factors such as health, education, employment, and domestic violence. This Gender Data Portal provides information essential to shaping impactful policies, improving project design, identifying data gaps, and drawing attention to urgent problems.

Rather than simply updating the Portal, the Gender and Data Groups enlisted the data visualization expertise of Graphicacy to dramatically overhaul the entire user experience and make the full breadth of critical information easier to navigate and understand for a much broader audience.

The navigation

The Gender Data Portal features approximately 1,000 pages, including one each for more than 200 countries. Graphicacy and the Gender and Data Groups streamlined the organization of the content around 14 main topics (such as assets, entrepreneurship, education, employment) with over 200 indicator groups comprising nearly 1,000 different indicators.

Graphicacy replaced the Portal’s one-dimensional dashboards with a home page presenting several options for exploring data. Clicking a topic card leads to a richer topic profile with visualizations of key indicators, a list of all indicators within that topic, and links to related content beyond the Portal.

With a more accessible Portal, the World Bank’s Gender and Data Groups aims to attract researchers, advocates, journalists, and others who will give the data a life of its own. The greater the exposure, the greater the chance gender data will reach policymakers and others in position to take action.

Graphicacy added capabilities for users to download full datasets, create shareable PDFs, and customize visualization colors and fonts for their own presentations and publications. The Gender and Data Groups also plans to conduct workshops for various audiences to help them better understand how to use the data for good in the context of their work.