Education and the type of occupation one holds are often correlated with one another. From the time a child is put in school until the time they finish, it is drilled in the head of the individual that a good education is needed in order to obtain a well-paying job. It is taught that hard work breeds success and young men especially are taught to be providers for their families which comes into play with the types of jobs they seek and level of education they want to achieve. This proved true for those living in Albany in the 1940s; the 1940 census helps to show that those that received a decent education held jobs that not only benefitted them but their families as well.
The census provides a wide range of information including the types of jobs that were held, the gender of those that held these jobs and their level of education. It seems as though many women did not work and often stayed at home to care for their children and other household duties. Although many of the women did not work, some did and they held quite prestigious jobs. The women that worked seems to not begin work until they are well in their late teens if that but most are in their very late twenties, early thirties and older. The census does show that a greater amount of men worked in comparison to women and they began to work quite early. As previously stated, although mostly men worked, some of the women that did had higher education levels then that way which made it possible for them to work higher paying jobs. The census shows that a few of the women received college degrees or higher and began lawyers and doctors whereas that was not quite the case for the men.
There are numerous jobs held by the people in the 1940 census; some of the jobs include accounting, barber, bartender, book keeper, lawyer, carpenter, cook and much more. The different jobs shows the level of education that the people that held these jobs had and how many people the criteria applied to. For example, one of the jobs held is a file clerk. Some of the people that were file clerks had different backgrounds in education. The census shows that twenty-four people completed high school and eleven completed elementary school and this shows that being a file clerk is not a job that may qualify as being of high standing or one that a person needed to have much experience in. In comparison to those that are lawyers, three people completed college and nine people went beyond a college degree and that shows that being a lawyer was a great accomplishment, one that not many could achieve for one reason or another. This pattern could be seen throughout the entire census; there are jobs that people hold which require little to no education and then there are the few jobs that require a higher education level. This comparison between the education level and occupation is an interesting one because it is evident that a good education gets you a better job but it is clearer on paper.
2 thoughts on “1940- Visual 1”
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A general writing comment: we talked about passive verbs with our walking tours, and it’s true for other kinds of writing as well. You start out with a lot of passive statements like “it is taught that” and “it is drilled.” Passive statements like this do two things–they make your statements really vague and general, and they weaken your argument because they make it sound like you’re backing away from your argument (in this case, the correlation between education and occupation). The last sentence of your first paragraph is a nice strong statement–remember that you’re the expert on this data! You and Camille are the only people who have worked with this at all, so you know what’s there more than anyone else in the world–you’re the foremost experts on 1940 Albany! You’ve got lots of good analysis already, so make sure that shows through in your writing with strong statements, rather than backing away from them with passive verbs.
Re: gender, right now you don’t have your education vs. occupation visual above broken down to show gender differences. If you’d like to have a male vs female version of this side by side, throw Gender into your rows field and exclude Null gender.
For this specific visualization and I think for your project in general, you’re going to want to spend a lot of time grouping your occupations down so that there are fewer categories to try to look at (I know it’s a pain in the butt). To make it less painful, I’d suggest thinking about what you already know are your big categories: maybe nursing/healthcare, teaching, sales, manufacturing/factory work, office work, government work. And remember that you can combine groups down the line as well: ie, foreman/forman + fareman/farman/ffarman might be a group. You may also want to exclude “wage or salary worker in private work” since it’s such a generic category it doesn’t really tell you anything, and there’s so many people in that category it makes it difficult to see the rest of your categories. The number of each people in each category will likely also change once you’ve grouped them into larger categories, which will be helpful in showing you bigger trends.
Re: the connection between education and occupation, you might want to try a scatterplot of average income vs average value of home (in columns and rows respectively), colored by education level or income–this will let you see really immediately if there’s a connection between education and income. You can also break it down further by adding race or gender to your columns or rows.
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