please empty your brain below
Evidence?
And why just pick the categories of race, age and sex? What about disability, wealth, attractiveness, interest in trains?
How easy would it be to include income, or social class (A, B, C1 perhaps)?
I think you would need at least eight people before there would be more than a 50% chance of one having attended a private school (6.5% or about 1 in 15). And fifty or more to get one that attended Oxbridge (less than 1%).
Think about that, and sex and age and ethnicity, when you are looking at corporate CEOs, or judges, or MPs.
Another consideration might be that our little group of 6 characters is not going to be the only thing that anyone sees. It will take its place among the thousands of images already out there. Historically these were (arguably) predominantly white and male. So perhaps we may wish to make a tiny effort to redress this balance.
Thank you.
Fortunately for the public bodies' graphic designers, most other characteristics aren't as immediately visually apparent. Though there is a trend to include some form of disability (necessarily a visible one), presumably on similar grounds.
Compare & contrast with housebuilders' artists' impressions of finished developments, which tend to reflect the people they want to sell to (always young, latte-holding...).
By reference to NRS social grade in 2016, which looks at the occupation of the "head" of the household, 1 in 25 are A (higher managerial, professional), 2 in 9 are B (intermediate managerial, professional), 2 in 7 are C1 (supervisory/junior managerial, professional), 1 in 5 are C2 (skilled manual), 1 in 7 are D (semi- or un-skilled) and 1 in 10 are E (state pensioners, casual, unemployed).
So of the six, three are ABC1 (no As, one rounded down B, two rounded up C1) and three are C2DE (one rounded down C2, and one each rounded up D and E).
And from ONS incomes data for 2018, the median annual income for each sextile would be £14k, £20k, £25k [national median of £29k in here] £30k, £38k, and £54k.
And do people just look to see their "skin colour" portrayed anyway? For example, would an 80 year old Sikh man see a 20 year old Muslim woman as representing him better than say an 80 year old white man?
But if you look at the population statistics that DG linked, you'd see the census data has many sub-categories for ethnic origin which are grouped into five main categories: white, black, Asian, mixed, and other. The sub-categories for Asian are described as Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, and other, and about two thirds are in the first three boxes, i.e. South Asian, rather than East Asian, or something else.
That said, ethnic origin maps poorly onto skin colour. If it helps, please imagine red, orange, yellow and green people. I'll let you decide which is which.
I look forward to a time when it is not necessary to be specific about the colour used to represent a human just as it is not necessary to specify a breed of dog when a image of a dog is used to signify "for all dogs".
But the proportions of pictures we show of different age groups don't have to be politically correct or correspond with national averages, because our services are mainly for older people.
See, I'm not sure you do - or, more accurately, you only need those if you're trying to do one particular thing, which is not the only thing you could do.
As an alternative, instead of picking representatives at 25% and 75% of the distribution, you could instead pick representatives at (with rounding) 33% and 67% of the distribution. Similarly, with n representatives, instead of picking people at 1/2n, 3/2n, .... 2n-1/2n, you could pick people at 1/n+1, 2/n+1.... n/n+1.
Is this better? It depends what you're trying to achieve. 50% of the population will be between 25% and 75% and people in the middle may not feel well represented by either alternative. On the other hand, with the more even distribution that I propose, more people will feel somewhat close to either of the alternatives proposed. On the downside, people at extremes of the distribution (e.g. the very old and the very young) would not be so well represented.
You can't say one is definitely better than the other, but you can come up with different reasonable ways to define what better is, and optimise accordingly.
An prime example is the recent visibility on UK television advertising of mixed race couples. If a company is trying to sell its cars/food delivery/mobile phones/banking services or whatever, there is good chance that their commercial will feature a loving couple with different racial heritages.
As part of a mixed race couple myself, I am amused that advertisers now see us as cool and trendy but I also recognise that, outside of London at any rate, partnerships of this kind are still pretty rare. It's nice to be "included", even if there aren't actually many of us. Still, if it stops people outside London staring at us as though we'd just landed from Mars, then it must be a good thing.
You can, of course, do it any way you like.
Maybe it's a bit of an angel-pinhead-dance thing.
dg writes: If you hover over the picture, its source is given.
64.1% are classified as some sort of white in the London Borough of Barnet (Wikipedia).
From the website "Engage Barnet", DG has reproduced only a section of a strip that runs along the top of the home page. I counted 16 figures out of which 9 seem to be white i.e. 56%. And selecting a few more pages I counted 20 out of 30 i.e. 66%. So I conclude this web site is doing a good job of reflecting the ethnic distribution of the population it serves.
If I use the broad ethnic categories in the census ("White", "Mixed", "Asian", "Black", "Other") I get the same first 6 as you (Asian being 4th and Black being 6th). You'd need 18 representatives to get the first Mixed person, and 27 for Other.
Using the narrower ethnic categories, which split for example Asian into "Indian", "Pakistani", "Bangladeshi", "Chinese", and "Other", the first Black (African) representative comes in at number 8, and Asian (Indian) at 9, with an "Other White" at number 4.
You could do a similar thing with ages if you accept that the picture is basically going to differentiate 3 categories of "young", "adult", and "elderly", and pick some thresholds.
dg writes: Read the post.
Can it be true? Are we still a civilized community? Thankfully yes. Egad!
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