>Radford Neal wrote:
>>
>> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>> Recall that this baseball example was intended to clarify how one
>> should go about determining whether or not there is reason to think
>> that MIT discriminated against women faculty. From your comment, I'd
>> guess that you think that MIT should not pay faculty based on their
>> actual achievements, but rather on the basis of some estimate of their
>> ability, disregarding "random factors". That's an interesting
>> opinion, but would a policy of paying based on actual achievement (or
>> a noisy estimate of actual achievement) constitute discrimination?
Thom Baguley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> No. I was writing about the statistical issues in
> general. Regardless of what the baseball example was intended to
> clarify, the claim that a _huge_ difference exists is a strong one
> that needs to be explained and supported in context.
Yes indeed. And the context in this case is the question of whether
or not the difference in performance provides an alternative
explanation for why the men were paid more (one supposes, no actual
salary data has been released).
In this context, all that matters is that there is a difference. As
explained in many previous posts by myself and others, it is NOT
appropriate in this context to do a significance test, and ignore the
difference if you can't reject the null hypothesis of no difference in
the populations from which these people were drawn (whatever one might
think those populations are).
Radford Neal
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Radford M. Neal [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept. of Statistics and Dept. of Computer Science [EMAIL PROTECTED]
University of Toronto http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~radford
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