Robert Kosara has a nice writeup on a scatterplot visualization in The New York Times back in 2010, and a modern recreation of it from Nathan Yau in D3.
The scatterplot shows men’s wages on the horizontal axis, women’s on the vertical. There is a dot for each type of job, like nurses, programmers, physicians, etc. The coloring groups them into larger occupation categories. If men and women made the same amount of money in one particular job, that point would sit on the main diagonal. That diagonal is clearly pointed out by the heavy black line. For jobs where men make more, the point moves to the right of the diagonal, and thus ends up below it.
If you like the graphic, make sure you also check out Nathan’s followup where he addresses a bit of a flub afterwards where it got picked up by CNN without proper attribution.
