Hi Rick

A few comments:
1) I think part of the job of a journalist is to educate people. People should know more when they finish reading an article than when they start. On substantive matters, probably few would disagree. But why shouldn't this include methodology? The scatter plot can be explained.

2) I think a fair proportion of the Times readers can read scatter plots.

3) What I think would be even better than the scatter plot you have is one where the x axis has "percent female 1980" and the y axis has the gain (or loss). Then "no change" is horizontal, and it's easier to compare distance from a horizontal line than distance from a diagonal one. This would be like a Tukey mean difference plot, but I think it is more intuitive (at least in this example) to let the x-axis be the starting value rather than the mean. This also lets us get away from categories like "large gain" and look at gain or loss more precisely.