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We're showing a pie graph that would show something like 53% male, 41% female and 7% unknown.
The "unknown" category includes many reasons we can't tell: we don't know, we can't know for legal reasons, we can't know for self-imposed privacy policy reasons, our data sources don't know, etc. The reasons are quite innumerable.
This seems like a common problem so I wanted to ask if there is a common solution?
Assuming you have a context where this level of accuracy matters (e.g. an academic or technical audience, or a delicate topic) it's always best to just clearly and simply state what's going on.
This 7% have a gender (male, female, or something else). For some, you know it, for some you don't. In all cases, you're not reporting it. So just say that:
...or if your organisation has a more informal tone of voice:
...or if your organisation has an [annoyingly] chatty tone of voice:
It seems that "Unknown" is true to the situation. Go with that. You could always explain, as you did on this site, why gender is unknown.
The usual third option is Other, which would encompass a variety of options including but not limited to: those who did not fall in to the Male/Female box; those that explicitly would rather not say; those who implicitly did not say; those where the data is not known, etc, etc.
And then if you feel the need to explain what 'other' actually entails, make it a link to a decent explanation that covers some of the popular reasons whilst respecting that there can be any number of other reasons not listed. That would at least show that you recognise the options rather than leaving the user to guess what Other means.
There is a third way - which is just to leave the 7% blank and not label it at all, but still that leaves the user guessing - although users aren't so dumb...
Clearly, reasons for 'would rather not say' are not the same reasons behind explicitly choosing 'other', which is one of the things that bothers me about such gender options in forms - assuming the data is really even necessary in the first place! In reality the 'would rather not say' could partially contribute to any one of Male, Female or Other, so if this is significant in your scenario, and you have the data, then you may want to rethink having just three categories.
n/a seems to fit well, and it is a known convention.
n/a or N/A is a common abbreviation in tables and lists for not applicable, not available or no answer.
You are asking for pie graphs specifically which are good for one thing and one thing only: showing which part or which combination/coalition has a share of 50% or more. Most often, they should have just two segments or visually highlighted segment groups.
You currently want to show three data points at once, but your data set is ordered hierarchically:
You want to collapse the sub-points of the first bullet into one, but not of the latter. That is a categorical error!
You have three, maybe four choices of diagrams:
Those show very different things, not all of which are of actual interest. You obviously want the third one, or a combination of the first and the third one. That is possible, but not as linear segments within a single pie chart: You could put the 7% N/A either into an outer ring or into a center circle, probably painted grayish (or semi-transparent); the former works well with multiple pie charts shown next to each other because you get to see data and quality of data at once, the latter may be better stand-alone.
To finally answer your actual question, the correct label for each segment follows automatically from correctly labeled charts.
