Road accidents biggest global killer of teenagers
 

Interesting reading:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-39920052

Bar graphs are useful for making quick comparisons but glancing at those provided gives a rather false impression of the numbers because the scales used for the male v female charts are totally different - 0-100,000 for the males but 0-40,000 for the females. I wonder why.

Many people to assume that, for example, more females than males die as a result of self harm. Closer scrutiny shows that more males actually die in this manner, especially in the UK where male suicide is at unprecedented levels with precious little being done about it.

Re: Biggest killer of teenagers
 

In this case they're using type of deaths as the comparison rather than male vs female. The value of the x-axis is determined by the dataset for each gender separately rather than together. The higher number of road deaths for men are throwing off the numbers, the female one would look weird if they kept the x-axis the same across both charts.

TBH I think the whole comparison on the world scale has little value because the differences in the causes and solutions between the developed and undeveloped world will be so different.

Re: Biggest killer of teenagers
 

I agree. I just think a lot of people won't notice or understand that as the two graphs have been made to look identical apart from the scale so at a glance the female figures look much worse when in fact they're not.