I saw this around Facebook, and decided that it would be my first image on propagandander.

It is actually interesting information, and it is well formatted, with the color wheel naturally drawing attention to the fact that the United States does not have the type of paid parental leave that some other nation’s have.

One possible propaganda element is the usage of cool colors for countries with high amounts of parental leave, shading into darker, earthier reds for countries with less. I don’t know if it was intentional, but in some ways that suggests that social policies like this are “cool and rational” while lack of such policies is “unthinking and irrational”.

But the real problem I have with this is I don’t know how true the claim is. The source is from nationmaster.com, which is a great site for graphs: I’ve used it for some of mine. However, while the laws in these countries might dictate paid parental leave, such laws might only apply to workers in the formal sectors of the economy. I would imagine that in countries like South Africa, Mexico and Pakistan, there are many women and men employed informally, who don’t have these legal protections. In fact, that is probably the case as well in some of the more developed countries.

In addition, the United States does have unpaid parental leave, and in some states, there is paid parental leave. If you are interested, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Americas gives a description.

Which is not to say the graph doesn’t raise a good point, but by giving a single source and assuming that this presents a complete view of the societies in question, it is somewhat misleading.