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Visualizing LGBTQIA+ communities in USA, their explicit protection by law, discrimination charges in the employment sector for the years 2015-2017

The legislation is a decisive factor for community members considering the state to move to, for work, for foreign nationals and citizens alike. Despite this, many states in the US do not offer explicit legal protection to LGBT+ communities at work in their state legislature even today. Explicit protection is defined as the explicit usage of the terms ‘sexual orientation’ and/or ‘gender identity’ or both in their state non-discriminatory statutes.

Sources

• Gallup Daily Tracking Survey: to estimate the number of LGBT people in the labor force in each state
• Movement Advancement Project: to determine the number of LGBT people in the labor force protected and not protected under current state statutes
• U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commision (EEOC): Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity based descrimination charges for each state.
• LGBT People in the U.S. Not Protected by State Nondiscrimination Statutes: Report published by UCLA Shool of Law Williams Institute (March 2019) indicating if states explicity protect the rights of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities in state legislature.

Notes

Based on our user research we identified that our audience is interested in data about incidents of decrimination in each state along with the laws of the land. Hence, we wanted to crossreference and visualize these 2 different datasets. But we could only find data on discrimination charges provided by U.S. EEOC for "Employment", we had to limit our visualization to the "Employment" sector.

We also selected years 2017-2015 because this was the range for which size of community data was available from the Gallop Poll in the Williams Institute Report. Data for other (recent and historical years) is paid. The hope is that this visualization technique be applied to this data when it becomes freely available.

Sized Grid Cartogram

'Joshua Tauberer recommends the use of cartograms in order to fairly represent demographic data, instead of the classic choropleth maps that "silence minorities"' - Sylvain Lesage, April 2, 2018 (Observable) More on that here.

Size

Each tile in the visualization represents the size of the LGBTQIA+ community in that state in the "Employment" sector aggregated over 2015-2017. Methological notes on how this was calculated can be found in the original report published by Williams Institue.

Color

White squares are for states that DO NOT explicitly protect communities in their legislature.
Grey squares are for states that explicitly protect communities in their legislature.

Text

States abbriviation.
Aggregated size of Community (2015-2017).