In the Globe and Mail newspaper on Thursday, Margaret Wente raised some questions concerning various measures of the “gender gap” in Canada.  You’ll find the full article here. Ms. Wente seems to accuse various labour reports and feminist activists of promoting their agenda with “a heaping cup of statistical abuse.”  It is usually fascinating to watch people in extreme ideological and political positions attempt to harness statistics to make their point.  In this case, it is not really a case of tampering with the numbers themselves – both sides are using nearly the exact same numbers to make two very different arguments.

One of the ways Ms. Wente believes that the statistics are being abused is the reporting that the gender wage gap in Canada currently is 70.5 cents.  Meaning essentially that for every one dollar a male worker earns, a  female worker earns 70.5 cents.

Ms. Wente goes on to demonstrate how she thinks this statement is statistical abuse:  “Take the gender wage gap. To arrive at 70.5 cents, the report compares full-time annual wages between men and women. What it doesn’t mention is that men work more hours in a year than women do. Once you adjust for that, the gap narrows to 84 cents. And when you adjust for work experience and women’s preference for jobs in the public sector and social services, the gap shrinks to 93 cents.”

Juxtapose this with a recent article by leading feminist researchers on the economy.  Dr. Sylvia Fuller of UBC and Dr. Leah Vosko the Canada Research Chair in Feminist Political Economy have recently published an article that arrives at very similar statistics.  The full article is available here, for a fee or with a subscription.

The difference is the lens used to interpret these statistics. While Ms. Wente believes that the narrowing wage gap as you control for different variables demonstrates that the wage gap is not really as big as it might initially appear, Drs. Fuller and Vosko choose to see the fact that accounting for job characteristics causes the gap to decrease as indications that the women are experiencing discrimination and less choice in those areas as well.

For example, there is not dispute currently that the gender was gap narrows when you control for the fact that more women work in public sector jobs and social service jobs.  But does this mean that really, women get paid nearly the same as men bu they simply prefer to work in sectors and industries that pay less to everyone overall?  Or does this mean that not only do women get paid less than men overall, women are also confined to industries and sectors that pay less as well?

One of my interests in becoming a statistical consultant is because I think the numbers and the data on their own are not enough.  We live in the proverbial “information age” and we literally have more data than we know what to do with.

Figuring out what to do with all that data is the exciting part.  Building a bridge of knowledge between the data and the people who can use that data is where the magic is.

We see many numbers every day.  But the context from which those numbers emerged is important.  And so is the context in which those numbers will end up.  This is the job of the data detective – to find the data you need, to harness the power of that data and to facilitate actions based on that data.

This blog is one place to find tips and thoughts on how to interpret others’ data and how to understand your own.  Please feel free to email your questions and problems and we’ll see what we can figure out together.

These questions and problems will form the basis of the blog posts.  As choosing the questions is usually the most important part of any project, statistical or otherwise.  Once you are clear on the questions, you usually get results.

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” Pablo Picasso