How to manually edit the colors in my bar chart without flipping chart orientation

Question

I am creating a population pyramid style bar chart in R of the number of work internships by age category, by gender. In a previous step I have summarized the data grouping by age and gender to get counts of internships. I then multiplied the Male counts by -1 for proper graph formatting.

All is well and good until I go to manually change the colors of the geom_bars. When I set them manually or use the scale_fill_manual option my chart rotates. Also can't quite figure out how to change the fonts.

This code works

#WEs

pyramidWE2 <- ggplot(WE2, aes(x = Age, y =n, fill = Gender)) + 
  geom_bar(data = subset(WE2, Gender == "F"), stat = "identity") +
  geom_bar(data = subset(WE2, Gender == "M"), stat = "identity") + 
  scale_y_continuous(breaks=seq(-100,100,10),labels=abs(seq(-100,100,10))) + 
  #commented out: scale_fill_manual(values =c("pink","light blue")) +
  #commented out: labs(x = "Age(Years)", y = "Number of WE's", title = "Number of Work Experiences by Gender, Colorado, 2018", font.lab="Trebuchet MS")
  coord_flip()
pyramidWE2

resulting graph:

But this code rotates the graph and removes the legend

#WEs
pyramidWE2 <- ggplot(WE2, aes(x = Age, y =n, fill = Gender)) + 
  geom_bar(data = subset(WE2, Gender == "F"), stat = "identity") +
  geom_bar(data = subset(WE2, Gender == "M"), stat = "identity") + 
  scale_y_continuous(breaks=seq(-100,100,10),labels=abs(seq(-100,100,10))) + 
  scale_fill_manual(values =c("pink","light blue")) +
  labs(x = "Age(Years)", y = "Number of WE's", title = "Number of Work Experiences by Gender, Colorado, 2018", font.lab="Trebuchet MS")
  coord_flip()
pyramidWE2

resulting graph:

Answer 1

A '+' is missing in one of your ggplot function. (after the labs()).

library(tidyverse)

WE2 <- data.frame(
  Age    = rep(seq(20, 60, 5), 2),
  Gender = rep(c('H', 'F'), each = 9),
  n      = rnorm(18, 40, 20) %>% ceiling()
) %>% 
  mutate(n = ifelse(Gender == 'F', -n, n))

WE2 %>% ggplot(aes(x = Age, y = n, fill = Gender)) + 
  geom_bar(data = subset(WE2, Gender == 'H'), stat = "identity") +
  geom_bar(data = subset(WE2, Gender == 'F'), stat = "identity") + 
  scale_y_continuous(breaks = seq(-100,100,10), labels = abs(seq(-100,100,10))) + 
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("pink", "light blue")) +
  labs(x = "Age(Years)", y = "Number of WE's", title = "Number of Work Experiences by Gender, Colorado, 2018", font.lab="Trebuchet MS") +
  coord_flip()