
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


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.
By BBC Radio 44.7
770770 ratings
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.

7,601 Listeners

377 Listeners

524 Listeners

1,052 Listeners

295 Listeners

5,477 Listeners

2,103 Listeners

2,093 Listeners

485 Listeners

35 Listeners

340 Listeners

412 Listeners

826 Listeners

236 Listeners

336 Listeners

79 Listeners

474 Listeners

372 Listeners

232 Listeners

132 Listeners

325 Listeners

3,175 Listeners

68 Listeners

833 Listeners

3,023 Listeners

504 Listeners

624 Listeners

120 Listeners

268 Listeners

256 Listeners

64 Listeners

78 Listeners

3 Listeners