The Mystery of the Median - The Numbers Guy - WSJ

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August 6, 2007, 4:32 PM ET

The Mystery of the Median

ByCarl Bialik

A front-page article on Friday in the New York Times told of a surprising trend: Working young women in New York and several other cities are earning more than men. Women in New York ages 21 to 30 who are full-time workers made 117% of mens wages, the Times reported, citing a report by Queens College demographer Andrew A. Beveridge in the Gotham Gazette that was in turn based on a custom analysis of a 2005 Census Bureau survey. But a chart accompanying the Times article showed a surprising pattern: While the median salary of all New York women in the age group was 17% greater than mens, the gender gap was smaller for each of four sub-groups highlighted in the chart: Asians, blacks, Hispanics and whites. Asian men and women made the same amount; Hispanic and black women outearned their male counterparts by just 8% and 7%, respectively; and white men made 13% more than white women. That discrepancy reflects the strange statistical properties of the median, which is the middle value of a group of numbers lined up in order. Because the median depends only on the middle value, it isnt affected by the very smallest and largest values which can create odd properties such as the one published in the Times chart. Weve seen this before, Edward Welniak, chief of the Census Bureaus income statistics branch, told me. Its something weve come to accept, and its because of the peculiarities of looking at statistics derived from medians. By way of illustration, imagine that after a mass exodus, New York was left with just 10 working men and 10 working women between 21 and 30. Six of the men make $100,000 each; the other four make $1 million each so the median mens salary is $100,000, while the mean (the sum of the salaries divided by the number of earners) is $460,000. Six of the women make $117,000 each, while the other four each make $30,000 making the median of womens salaries $117,000, which is much

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The Mystery of the Median - The Numbers Guy - WSJ

http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/the-mystery-of-the-median-163/tab/print/

larger than the mean of $82,200. Therefore the median of the womens salaries is 17% greater than the median of the mens. (Even though, as a group, the 10 men made much more than the 10 women.) Now imagine that all of these young working New Yorkers are white, black or Asian (and identify themselves as belonging to just one race). Six men are white; five earn $100,000, while one earns $1 million. Their median salary is $100,000. Of the six white women, two earn $117,000, and the other four earn $30,000. Their median salary is $30,000 less than one-third of the mens. Of the three black men, two earn $1 million and one earns $100,000, so their median is $1 million. The three black women all earn $117,000, making their median salary $117,000, barely one-ninth the mens. The lone Asian man earns $1 million, and the lone Asian woman earns $117,000, again barely one-ninth of his. So in each subgroup, looking at the median would suggest that men earn far more than women. But the median for the overall population tells a very different story just as in the Times chart. Footnotes: Prof. Beveridges analysis, featured in the Times article, was his own based on individual responses to a Census survey. (He didnt respond to my requests for comment.) Its unclear if all New York men between 21 and 30 together earned more than their female counterparts. If Prof. Beveridge gets back to me, Ill update this post. The Censuss own, precalculated statistical tables arent so detailed as to examine earnings by age, gender, geographical location and race, all at the same time. For all New York City wage-earners, the median mens salary was 11% greater than the median womens salary. Thats based on the 2005 American Community Survey, which covered three million housing units nationwide, including nearly 39,000 completed surveys in New York City.

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