The nineteen forty Albany census provides us with resident’s basic personal information, but it contains a much deeper story in between the lines. When simplifying the information and the numbers, many judgments can be made about the circumstances of this time period. The unemployment and employment rate of each gender, income of specific households and citizenship based on birthplace are just a few of the pieces of data that can be discovered within the census. My data visualization displays the average age of employed persons based on gender. On the female side, the average age of unemployed women was over forty years old, just about forty-two, and the average age of employed women was just over thirty-five years old. This tells me that the average women in the nineteen forty’s worked for pay for a shorter span of their lives than males did. With that being said, Men in the nineteen forty’s saw an average age of unemployment of just under forty years old, only a few years younger than their female counterparts. The average age of males who were employed for pay is greater than the average of those who are unemployed, being just over forty. This represents that males may have been struggling to find jobs when they were younger, but as they aged and gained experience then they were able to find a job and work there until they retire. Persons whose gender is nullified on the census demonstrates a higher average age of unemployed persons than employed persons. This relationship is similar to that of females so this leads me to believe that most of the persons whose gender is nullified on the census are women. For those whose employment status was nullified in the census they saw a very low average age for both females and males, about 15 and 18 respectively. These persons were most likely nullified when it comes to employment status because they are so young and may not have been expected to work just yet because of academic reasons.
Re: your average ages, you’ll need to filter out children under working age if you’re making an argument regarding average age of unemployed/employed–it doesn’t really make sense to count children as unemployed if no one expects them to have jobs!
It looks like you’ve filtered out the category “Institution”–this is a difficult but really interesting category, because it means someone who lived long term in a prison, hospital, nursing home, orphanage, convent, or other type of institutional group home. If you’re interested in this question of gender vs. age in different categories, that would be one worth investigating.
This “The average age of males who were employed for pay is greater than the average of those who are unemployed, being just over forty. This represents that males may have been struggling to find jobs when they were younger, but as they aged and gained experience then they were able to find a job and work there until they retire.” is a really interesting, really good observation–one that would be worth investigating further to see if it’s true for different occupations. For example, do men in different occupations differ by their average age? Does men’s average income change by age in different occupations?