If you conduct a quick internet search on “history of data visualization,” you’ll nearly always see Florence Nightingale included in the annals of history. Why? It’s not like a Nightingale Rose chart is easy to read, or a cinch to make, or even all that common.

One clue to the answer lies in the fact that she is most often the only woman on such lists.

Many women know that when you are the only woman present on a panel full of men, two things are highly probable: (1) you are working in a male-dominated field, and (2) you are likely a token because somebody thought there had better be some diversity. Florence Nightingale is our data visualization historical token female.

History is written by cis white men. And history is upheld by them too, even among the data visualization crowd of today, who cull these lists of historically important figures and decide whose stories will be remembered, whose work will become “foundational.” At least initially, they, like me, perhaps took to Nightingale because they readily recognized her name from high school history books (written by — guess who) where her role in the war was recorded— though her Rose chart usually wasn’t printed.

But if her inclusion in the annals of viz history is really about how impactful or accomplished Nightingale was as a visualizer, we would see greater discussion of her OTHER charts and graphs, instead of reducing her contributions to a single image. We would learn that she was the first woman voted into the Royal Statistical Society. We would read about her as the equal to other “founding fathers” of the field. (RJ Andrews is expanding on this topic, which you can find here.)

“Willard's Temple Of Time”, Emma Willard, 1846 (link)

Distribution of sun-spots by latitude and rotation, Annie Munder, 1908, (link)

If her presence in these lists was really about including historically important visualizations, we would see those same lists and books and classes include many more female visualizers throughout history. Who, you ask? Take Emma Willard, a pioneering educator who revamped the way geography was taught by designing her own set of more accurate and contextual maps. While typical geography curricula used maps that focused on the thirteen original US colonies, thereby starting the discussion at the American Revolutionary War, Willard drew maps based on Native American territories (though they would likely be disputed by Native Americans) to focus the conversation on what was happening on the land before the invasion. They would also include Florence Kelley, Annie Maunder, Marie Neurath, and Mary Eleanor Spear— just to name a few. Stay tuned for more profiles on these women to come soon in Nightingale and in the meantime, look up the work of Catherine D’Ignazio & Lauren Klein.

So why is Nightingale the token?

I’m no historian, but I suspect it’s in part because the accounting of viz history is rooted in Europeans and their wars: Nightingale’s Rose chart on soldier deaths, Minard’s alluvial diagram of Napoleon’s march, Playfair’s original pie chart of the domination of the Turkish empire, and so on. The scope of our field’s history, like so much of the way history has been framed, is Eurocentric in view and rooted in conquest.

“Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East”, Florence Nightingale (1858)

If we wanted a fuller picture of the history of data visualization, we would need to include North African cave paintings dating back to 6000 BCE that tracked shifts in weather and migration. We would need to include the Aztec calendar that was our original timeline (well, time circle — just goes to show you that linearity is not universal).

These historically important visualizations go far beyond Europeans and wars but have been almost entirely omitted from historical discussions primarily conducted by cis white men about cis white men. (If you want to stop reading because of this phrase I challenge you to first ask yourself why and then to keep reading to see what you can learn from being uncomfortable.) When history is written to uphold the dominant power structure time and time again, it’s no wonder we get visualization history that includes cis white men and the token white female. (Just to be clear — white women and people of color have most certainly had their role in upholding various aspects of this dominant power structure, too — Florence Nightingale included. But given clear patterns of oppression, many would agree that everyone else is following the cis white male lead.)

Women have always had to fight for credibility and recognition in a male-dominated world.

Nor is this struggle specific to women exclusively. We know that the contributions of many non-male, non-cis, non-white people have been rendered invisible over the years. And while you’d think visualization (or really any major field like science, mathematics, or engineering) would get visibly more inclusive as time moved forward, such has not really been the case. In the modern era of data visualization, many point to Cleveland, Tufte, and Few — who all share a particular demographic in common — as forefathers. But how many of the foremothers referenced above could you name? Have you been taught the legacy of their impact on the field, or seen the countless examples of their work? It would be absurd to assume these women didn’t exist — when really they fit an unfortunately all-too-common historical pattern that their work is simply not recognized by the dominant voices throughout history.

Even today, where the data visualization field is large and international, cis white men still dominate, through both hidden and overt ways. Men and women alike are probably able to identify some of the more overt ways, so let me tell you three stories about the more hidden ways that data visualization is still a man’s world, despite the efforts of women (and some men) to change it.