Equality Research Methods

Background

Each year, typically in August, WalletHub releases a report on the “Best & Worst States for Women’s Equality”. Each of the 50 states is ranked by comparing the disparities between men and women across 17 key indicators of women’s equality in the areas of workplace environment, education and health, and political empowerment. States received points based on their levels of equality for each indicator, which are totaled to a score out of 100. These total scores for each state are compared to provide a ranking out of 50 (1st being the best ranking). 

Since 2015, Utah has ranked 50th. Therefore, in 2021, the UWLP provided an in-depth follow-up report about WalletHub's findings from that year: Women’s Equality in Utah: Why Utah Is Ranked as the Worst State, and What Can Be Done. This investigation replicated the WalletHub scores and evaluated which factors contributed to low scores for women’s equality in Utah. Replication was conducted by locating the original data sources then reverse engineering the WalletHub calculations. Several indicators were not perfectly replicated, though the UWLP also found Utah to rank 50th overall in women’s equality. Explanations for the Utah score on each indicator were then provided alongside a recommendation for how to increase the state score.

Full Research Paper and Team

The interactive dashboards were originally a visual representation of the data and findings from the 2021 UWLP report authored by Susan R. Madsen & Greg P. Madsen and commissioned by Zions Bank. The dashboards have since been updated to reflect the most recent data for each indicator and will continue to be updated annually. Note that published data for many indicators lag a year or more behind the current year.

Supplementary data visualizations were built by the UWLP Analytics Solution Center (ASC) team. Members included: Polly Conrad, Lianne Wappett, Carly Fox, Abby Jensen, Madison Sperry, Brianna Brown, Hannah Davies, Anders Gilvear, and Kennedy Marshall. Since 2021, additional ASC students have worked on this project: Quinn Gerber and Kylee Zimmerman.

Sources

Data used in the Women's Equality Report and supplemental data used in dashboard visualizations, organized by indicator metric.