pyramid_chart: population pyramid charts in Stata • pyramid

pyramid_chart is a Stata command that draws a population pyramid: a back-to-back horizontal bar chart showing how a population is distributed across age groups (or any ordered category) for two groups, typically male and female. Bars show each category’s share of its group’s total, labelled with percentages, and the axes, legend and labels are built for you from the variables’ value labels.

Population pyramid for the United States, 2000, drawn with pyramid_chart

Installation

From SSC:

ssc install pyramid_chart, replace

Or manually: download pyramid_chart.ado and pyramid_chart.sthlp into your working directory or a folder on your adopath.

Quick start

The data must be in long format: one row per category × group, with a numeric value, a categorical over() variable, and a two-level by() variable coded 1 and 2 with value labels.

sysuse pop2000, clear
keep agegrp maletotal femtotal
rename (maletotal femtotal) (population1 population2)
reshape long population, i(agegrp) j(sex)
label define sexlbl 1 "Male" 2 "Female"
label values sex sexlbl

pyramid_chart population, over(agegrp) by(sex) dec(1) ///
    title("Population Pyramid for year 2000") subtitle("in percentages") ///
    xtitle("Percentage") ytitle("Age groups")

Syntax

pyramid_chart varname [if] [in], over(varname) by(varname) dec(#) ///
    [bar1(barlook_options) bar2(barlook_options) sctopt(scatter_options) twoway_options]

Option	Description
`over(varname)`	Categorical variable on the vertical axis (e.g. age group). Its value labels become the axis labels.
`by(varname)`	Two-level variable splitting the pyramid: level 1 is drawn left, level 2 right. Value labels feed the legend.
`dec(#)`	Decimal places for the percentage labels on the bars.
`bar1()`, `bar2()`	Appearance of the left and right bars, e.g. `bar1(color(navy)) bar2(color(orange))`.
`sctopt()`	Options for the bar labels, e.g. `sctopt(mlabcolor(blue) mlabsize(small))`.
twoway_options	Any other `twoway` option: `title()`, `subtitle()`, `xtitle()`, `ytitle()`, `scheme()`, `note()`, `name()`, …

The legend and both axis labels are generated from the data, so legend(), xlabel() and ylabel() are not meant to be overridden.

Examples

Full worked examples, with output, are on the package website, and in Stata via help pyramid_chart.

Default	Custom bar-label colour	With a scheme

Citation

Rahman, M. (2024). PYRAMID_CHART: Stata module to generate a population pyramid chart. Statistical Software Components S459350, Boston College Department of Economics. https://ideas.repec.org/c/boc/bocode/s459350.html

Contributing

Bug reports and feature requests are welcome as issues; code contributions as pull requests. Thanks to Fernando Rios-Avila for the version check, per-side bar colours and scatter-label options in v1.2.

pyramid_chart