A skewed view of ten Indian states
The Economist published this chart to illustrate the problem of the "missing girls" in Indian society.
The girls-to-boys ratio (ages 0-6) should be about 952 but in India, it is 914. That's an average number for 35 territories, and the most skewed ratio was 830 in Punjab.
Curiously, the Economist chose to focus on only 11 states instead of showing all 35. The first 10 of these had sex ratio below the natural number of 952 while the last one was over the average. Nowhere on the chart or in the article is it explained whether the unmentioned 24 states all had above-average sex ratios: unlikely, unless certain states have much higher youth population than others.
In fact, the reference line of 952 is misplaced. Readers will find that there are two metrics depending on which survey one is looking at, either sex ratio at birth or sex ratio for children aged 0-6. The natural ratio of 952 is for the 0-6 measure but the data by territory are all for the at-birth measure. Instead, the dotted red line needs to be at 904, which is the national average sex ratio at birth for India for the 2006-8 period.
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The lethal error in this chart is not starting the horizontal axis at zero.
By cutting off the same amount from each bar, this chart messes up the ratio of lengths, and presents a misleading picture of the relative sex ratio between territories. We may think Punjab's sex ratio is half that of Gujarat (in the original chart) but as the chart on the right shows, that is far from the truth!
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The other unfortunate practice, typical of the Economist, is to stick a second set of data on the right of the chart as an afterthought. In fact, that data representing the change in the sex ratio over time is more interesting than what the exact sex ratio was in each territory in 2006-8.
A much better way to present the data, without favoring one series or another, is the Bumps chart, as shown below. We can clearly see that the improvement in sex ratio is concentrated on those states that started out the decade in a worse shape.
