There’s just one little issue with the GOP’s ‘International Women’s Day’ graphic

What you may notice, in addition to the description above, is the diversity displayed by those hands. There are black hands and brown hands and white hands, a representation of the panoply of races and ethnicities that constitute our world. It was truly an international representation.

Looking at it, though, it was hard not to be struck by how little it looked like the party itself. So I decided to make iterations of the design that more accurately reflected the makeup of the population of the world, the country and the political parties themselves.

It is obviously fraught to try to pick out which hand in the above graphic is meant to represent which racial group. So, instead, I assigned different colors to the five groups most common in the United States: Asian, Black, Hispanic, White and … everyone else. There’s no elegant way to refer to racial groups that aren’t sufficiently populous to break out individually, so please bear with our formulation.

We’ll note at the outset that these distributions don’t really apply very well to the world at large. Obviously, the United States’ population is largely an amalgamation of groups that immigrated from the rest of the world, but it’s still a bit odd to simply lump the billion-plus Chinese people in with the billion-plus Indian people to categorize them broadly as “Asian” as might be done by the Census Bureau. Yet, for the sake of comparison, that’s what we’ve done.

Using continent-level population data from the United Nations, we’ve put together a loose estimate of the composition of the world’s population using the categories we apply in the United States. Using that distribution — and applying our own horrifying typography — we end up with a representation of the world population that looks like this.

A lot of Asian hands. Not many White ones.

In the United States, the distribution looks different. The Census Bureau identifies Hispanic as an ethnicity, accounting for Black and White Hispanics. The data represented below shows non-Hispanic White and Black Americans.

The effect is immediate: a lot more White hands than in the global view. Not that this is surprising, obviously. There are more than eight times as many people in China and India alone as in the United States overall, a country that is 60 percent White.

There are some caveats that apply here. The first is that this is a broad representation of the party overall, not just its women. (It seems likely that Republican women are less diverse than Republican men, given the extent to which women of color identify as Democrats.) The second is that the Pew estimates are rough enough that there may be one more or fewer hands of any particular group.

Broadly, though, this is what the party looks like: mostly White. The Republican Party is less diverse now than the Democratic Party was in 1992, even as the country has gotten much less densely White.

For the sake of comparison, here’s the same representation for the Democratic Party.

Still more white — and, therefore, more White — than the world overall, but certainly more diverse.

It’s important to note that there’s nothing wrong with the GOP’s graphic. It is, in fact, a representation of the diversity women represent globally. But it does serve as a very pointed reminder that the Republican Party itself is far, far less of a kaleidoscope.