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The Women’s March on Washington Written Component

Abstract

This study researched the geospatial distribution of the cities that participated in the Women’s March on January 21st, 2017. It was the largest single day protest in US history. Only the cities in the United States were visually represented even though cities worldwide participated in marching.

Introduction

The march occurred the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated. Donald Trump is seen as a threat to human rights and our planet. Everyone congregated to show support for one another and express their stance on the importance of equality, respect, affordable healthcare, education, fair laws, protecting the environment and the integrity of our government. Over 4 million people marched for what they believe to be morally just and protested against the people in our government and nation that have acted in a disrespectful, immoral, selfish, greedy, misogynistic, insensitive, politically incorrect way. The people elected into our government in the 2016 election are seen as people who will strive to take away rights from the majority people but specifically: women, the disabled, the LGBTQ community, immigrants and most races except for white people. The recently elected officials have been very explicit about their dislike of the aforementioned groups and systematic plans to rid those people of rights. I think it is important to do this research to highlight the power of protest, our society and to show that governments are and should be held to high standards. It is imperative that we voice when the government is acting in a way our society and morals don’t agree with. The government should protect the people of our country instead of making greedy decisions at the disbenefit of the lower classes. It is essential that the American people be involved in our democracy and express their opinions. By this research highlighting the massive turnout across the country it will further encourage and support the people of our nation to have basic human rights of protection, healthcare, and respect.

This research aims to show the spatial distribution of Women’s March populations throughout the United States in order to better understand and visualize the reach and impact of the protest. This study will use data collected online in conjunction with ArcGIS to visually display the march locations.

Methods

The study area for this project was the United States of America even though Women’s Marches occurred all over the world. The worldwide statistics are shown but not geographically represented on the map. The data were acquired from an online link to a Google Sheets document. It was downloaded and edited using Excel. Any cities with less than 20 participants per march were taken out. That data were complied by two professors from the University of Denver and University of Connecticut, Jeremey Pressman, and Erica Chenoweth. The professors researched news articles, social media check-ins and online forums to estimate the attendance of every Women’s march in the world. The data included high and low estimates and the sources of the original information that influenced the estimates for each city. After extraneous data were edited out, it was geocoded in ArcMap based off of the city and state name provided. This step was very difficult to accomplish. After many failed efforts to join the Excel document with a shapefile that already had cities with geographic coordinates, an address locator was used in ArcMap to successfully georeference the Women’s March cities. The data included the number of participants in each of the cities that had a march. Graduated symbols were used to represent the population size of each march. Hawaii and Alaska were represented in separate frames and an inset map was used in the northeast region of the United States where the states are difficult to see on a small scale map. The graduated symbols were broken into seven different categories depending on the number of participants. The categories were classified manually where there were natural breaks in the data but the classes were also chosen depending upon the number of marches per each participation count. For instance, because 300 out of the 555 marches in the United States had 500 participants and below I created more classes in the lower participant range to show the data more accurately. Labels were generated in ArcMap from the United States layer acquired from Natural Earth vector data. Summarize in ArcMap was used to get statistical results about participants per state and number of marches per state. Once the data was edited, symbolized, and summarized it was transferred to Adobe Illustrator for fine tuning of the visual components of the map.

Discussion

In my results it showed that the participation in the Women’s March on Washington occurred throughout all parts of the United States. There were at least two march cities per state; even in tiny Rhode Island. Only one march took place in Washington D.C. but it was the largest of all the marches in the United States. Washington D.C. is the site of the official Women’s March on Washington and was the catalyst for encouraging other cities to participate in protesting as well. Overall there were 654 cities where marches occurred in the United States of America and 915 international cities that participated in marching. It was estimated that about 4,157,900 people marched for human rights in that one day. The residents of a research station in Antarctica even participated in protesting for the Women’s March. Every island of Hawaii held a march and Alaska was the state with the highest number of marches and lowest population. In Alaska there were 23 marches and the population is only about 740,000 people. In New York there were 26 marches and a population of about 8.5 million. Three of the top 10 largest marches occurred in California in the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco and California. The Midwest had the least dense area of marches with the west and east coasts having far more marches. This may also be representative of religious, political or population rates in the Midwest.

If I had more time I would have used census data to compare to the march populations. In doing so I could have shown the ratios for the march cities to determine what marches had the highest turnout rate compared to the total populations. For example, Alaska had a lot of marches occur but has a small population in comparison to other states with similar march rates and larger populations such as New York. Another limitation I faced was the denseness of the symbols on the map. I would have liked to clean up the symbolization and create more inset maps to show larger scale spatial distribution of the march populations. The research could be further expanded to look at the spatial distribution of the international cities and a great amount of statistical data could be complied to determine how the international cities participation was the same or different from the participation in the United States. More research could also be done comparing the march participation and religious or political beliefs of each state or city.

Bibliography

Alcindor, Anemona Hartocollis and Yamiche. "Women's March Highlights as Huge Crowds Protest Trump: 'We're Not Going Away'." The New York Times. The New York Times, 21 Jan. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.

Board, The Editorial. "What the Women's March Stands For." The New York Times. The New York Times, 20 Jan. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.

Fishwick, Carmen, Caroline Bannock, and Guardian Readers. "Why We Protested in Solidarity with the Women's March on Washington." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 22 Jan. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.

Frazee, Gretchen. "What the Women's March Wants." PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, 18 Jan. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.

Friedersdorf, Conor. "The Significance of Millions in the Streets." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 23 Jan. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.

Pressman, Jeremy, and Erica Chenoweth. "Crowd Estimates, 1.21.2017." Google. Google, 26 Jan. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.