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Dashboard Week – Day 5: Could you Afford to be a Single Mum?

This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.

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It’s finally here—the last day of Dashboard Week!

For our final challenge, we’re working with a massive dataset that covers everything from US childcare costs to wages by gender, shared income households, and population data, to name just a few. It’s a lot to unpack, but I’m excited to dive into it.

As someone who’s personally aware of the challenges around childcare, I’ve always felt that the burden it places on families—especially single mothers—is significant. Juggling work, raising children, and covering living expenses is no easy feat, and it’s something I wanted to explore further. So, for my final story, I focused on whether single mothers in the US can afford childcare based on their occupation.

The dataset provided a wealth of information, but it didn’t include details on occupational salaries, which was a key piece of the puzzle for me. To fill this gap, I added a supplementary dataset that required some light data cleaning. You can see below in my Alteryx workflow how I initially wanted to incorporate birth rates as well, but in the end, I decided to leave that out of the final dashboard to keep things focused.

Unlike the last 4 days, I really needed to adhere to the time restraints and present on the same day the task was assigned. All in all, this was a challenging and rewarding week, and I’m happy with the insights I was able to extract from such a rich and complex dataset!

 

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