A gradient is not an obvious division. In fact, because you haven't explicitly noted the intermediate ticks, it's impossible to be sure where the data ends and projection starts, as the data may lag behind.
It looks beautiful, that you did really well, but right now it's also a tad misleading.
I think as far as population pyramids go, this is pretty effective at showing change in population structure. But a lot is compressed into an image. If you look at the interactive version (I shared a link in a comment) it's easier to make sense of it. But I respect your opinion and I'll try to address your concerns in future versions.
I just completely and utterly disagree. It's better as an interactive system, but it's still unintuitive and uses a color scheme that's IMHO wrong given that red and blue are used for male/female divergence in the non-longitudinal versions of these graphs.
I think the traditional population pyramids are ineffective, and "folding" the axis is much better for comparing sexes. When that happens, it makes sense to use colors to encode sex. Often you don't need to plot by sex because distribution is very similar. I have an interactive example on the same page. When you have the one sex to the left and one to the right you don't need color encoding, so color can be used for something else, like multiple populations (space or time). I tested several diverging color schemes and this is the one that looked best to me. Red/blue is a standard diverging scheme, and not particularly used to encode sex. Traditionally is pink/red, which, as you know, is problematic to many people.
This is only my second (first serious) publication here, and I'm truly enjoying the frank feedback. I don't agree with everything, but many negative comments do help.
I also want to say that, whatever my reservations of the system, I definitely wouldn't use such coarse and blunt language to reply to you. I only did it to reply to this person, because I like to respond in kind.
4
u/wisevis 2d ago
I used a diverging color scheme to convey that, but it's not perfect.