Bad headline and graphic

An unfortunate headline in the Herald:

Key pulling more women than Brash

Bronagh would be most concerned if this was the case 🙂

This makes it look like Labour is way ahead of National amongst women voters, and that this has barely changed since the last election.

You have to read the article very carefully to work out that what this graph shows is what proportion of total support for a party is from female voters. This would be much better represented as a pie graph showing male/female ratios.

For those interested I have reverse engineered the figures to estimate the female support for each party in 2005 and 2008.

In 2005 Labour had approximately 44.7% support from women and National 33.9% support.

In 2008 Labour had approximately 37.5% support from women and National 45.4% support. So National is attracting around 8% more support from women than Labour is.

This is based on average party vote in 2005 being 41% Lab, 39% National and in 2008 being 35% Labour and 50% National.