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Tim Harford explains the numbers and statistics in the news and in life

Tim Harford explains the numbers and statistics in the news and in life.

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Simpson’s Paradox

29/04/2016 GMT

BBC World Service - More or Less, Simpson’s Paradox

We explore how statistics can support two seemingly contradictory results.

We explore two instances where women seemed to be suffering discrimination – but was it just a misunderstanding of the statistics?

A Dutch statistician recently became suspicious by headlines in the Dutch news that women were being discriminated against when it came to getting science research funding. Professor Casper Albers of the Heymans Institute for Psychological Research, Groningen, discovered that the study into the funding process showed that when you looked at the overall numbers of successful candidates, women seemed to be less successful than men. And yet, when you looked at a breakdown of the different subjects people could apply for, it showed that women were not losing out disproportionately to men. How could two opposite findings be true? This contradiction is explained by a famous statistical paradox. We explain what is known as Simpson’s Paradox with the aid of a choir metaphor, performed by the BBC Singers.

(Image: A circle of women and men, Credit: Thinkstock)

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