WS More or Less: Simpson’s Paradox
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 2 May 2016
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, Tim Harford here. Thank you for downloading the shorter World Service edition of More or Less, |
| 0:05.8 | first broadcast on Friday the 29th of April. This is about Simpsons Paradox. So if you've listened to |
| 0:12.1 | the longer version of our show, you may already have heard this item. |
| 0:16.4 | Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. We're the programme that looks for the truth behind the numbers in news, in life and in politics. |
| 0:25.5 | And I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:27.0 | Casper, just before you get going, have you started recording at your end? |
| 0:30.7 | Yes, we have. |
| 0:31.8 | This is Casper Albers. |
| 0:33.6 | I'm an associate professor in statistics at the Psychology Department of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. |
| 0:40.0 | Each year he gets a new cohort of students to teach and each year he explains the best known statistical pitfall around. |
| 0:48.3 | Any statistician worth her salt knows about this one. |
| 0:51.6 | It's called Simpson's Paradox. |
| 0:54.4 | And this paradox became famous in the mid-1970s, when the University of Berkeley, they had |
| 1:01.2 | admission procedures for different degrees. You know this story, Charlotte? I do indeed. If you |
| 1:06.9 | looked at the success rates for applicants to the University of Berkeley, California, it seemed pretty clear that there was some kind of bias in the process. |
| 1:14.8 | For some reason, female applicants were less likely to be accepted than male applicants. |
| 1:18.8 | Which sounds pretty cut and dried, the only question is why. |
| 1:22.3 | So statisticians started to look at individual departments |
| 1:25.6 | to see how their acceptance rates varied for men and women. |
| 1:29.2 | They reckoned that might shed some light on the issue. |
| 1:31.8 | But here's the curious thing. |
| 1:34.1 | Department by department, the success rate for women was just as high as a success rate for men. |
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