Data & Eggs
Volume 232
In this week’s edition: gendered language, working parents, and tensions in Ukraine.
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Gender and language
As the movement to recognize gender identities beyond male and female has grown, it’s meant languages across the world have had to evolve. In some “natural gender” languages, like English and Swedish, that’s mainly meant adding genderless variations of personal pronouns. But in other languages, like Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic, gender plays such a significant role in everyday speech that more creative solutions are required. Reuters breaks down considerations when it comes to gender-neutral language.
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The well-being of working parents.
Working parents haven’t had it easy these past two years. Often trapped at home with kids and a career to balance, many parents report feeling exhausted, cynical, and ineffective. This project from McKinsey explores how working parents have coped with the challenges posed by the pandemic, based on a survey of 35,000 people.
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How Much Americans Make
You probably saw the widely circulated story about how badly Wharton students did when guessing the median income of an American worker. And while Wharton students vastly overshot the actual answer ($43k), that doesn’t tell the full story. FlowingData’s Nathan Yau uses data from the 2020 American Community Survey to dive deeper into how much Americans are paid.
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Ukraine and Russia on the edge of war
Tensions between Russia and Ukraine have been redhot for months now, as Russia amassed some 100,000 troops near the Ukrainian border. Western nations, including the U.S. and Britain, now fear that Moscow could be preparing to invade Ukraine, as a way of keeping it from joining NATO. Reuters breaks down where we might go from here.
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What Spotify data show about the decline of English
Over the last five years, more and more popular songs on Spotify have been sung in a language other than English. That’s according to an analysis by The Economist of more than 320,000 songs that reached the top 100 tracks on Spotify in 70 different countries. Their analysis also reveals interesting patterns in the “musical kinship” that exists between countries.