Thank you for downloading this program from BBC Radio 4. I'm Tim Halford.

Hello and welcome to more or less your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life.

This week, Angry Owls, the death of the Great British pub,

and we ask the Office for National Statistics to do some hard sums.

45, 9, 0, divided by 3, 0, 8, 1, 13%.

Well, at least you didn't pull the number out of thin air.

But first, this week, the police federation told us that the anti-drink drive message

wasn't getting through to women, and whilst convictions for men had dropped by a quarter,

convictions for women had risen by 16%.

But loyal listeners Sarah emailed more or less at bbc.co.uk to ask whether, in fact,

this was just that there were lots of men drink driving in the first place,

and very few women, rather than there being a problem with the advertising.

Well, Charlotte Mcdonald is our alcohol expert, Charlotte.

Do we know whether it's true that the drink drive campaign is failing to persuade women?

We don't. But more fundamentally, we don't know where the police federation

thinks these numbers are from. It looks like cherry picking old data to us.

The 24% drop in the conviction rate for men, and the 16% rise in the conviction rates for women

are true between 2003 and 2009. But we have more recent figures, and they show that between 2003

and 2012, the number of women convicted for drink driving has actually fallen by 7%.

Do we have a sense of the broader trend?

We don't have figures for every year, but we do have data points here and there,

which suggests that female drink driving was slightly on the rise in the late 1990s,

...