Nigel Marriott's Blog

An independent statistician using data to understand our world and to predict the future

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UK Economy Tracker #0 – My New Tracker Explained!

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Welcome to my first tracker post of the UK economy!  I intend this to be similar in format to my UK Weather Tracker except that it will be published quarterly rather than monthly.  In this post I will explain the statistics I have chosen to track.

I am a big believer in placing recent statistics in their historical context.  Nothing annoys me more than someone overexplaining a small dip in GDP which in historical terms is absolutely meaningless.  Unfortunately we live in a world cursed by the year on year comparison without any understanding of basic time series concepts such as autocorrelation and reversion to the mean.  So one hope I have with my Economy Tracker is to improve this state of affairs.

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Pay Gaps #1 – 7 ways to misuse gender pay gap data

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April 2018 was the deadline for submitting gender pay gap results and we now have the first detailed picture of how pay differs between men and women in the UK.  A nifty government website can be used to look up pay gap details for any company employing more than 250 employees and you can also download the results for further analysis.  So what will happen next?  Will the data be used properly to inform debate about how men and women are paid or will it be misused for personal and political gain?

I believe this data can be of benefit to the debate around gender equality but my fear is that to begin with, it will be misused, misinterpreted and reinforce the saying “lies, damned lies and statistics”.  So if you want to misuse gender pay gap data, who better to ask that a professional statistician like me who will show you how you can do this by commenting on 7 plausible statements.

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Pay Gap Data #1 – Where can I find gender pay gap data for 2017?

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This post is out of date.  Please click here for a later version.

The government requires all organisations employing 250 or more employees to submit gender pay gap data.  The first set of submissions were completed in April 2018 but these figures refer to pay made in April 2017 i.e. a year ago.  Organisations can submit their 2018 data now if they wish and not wait for the deadline of April 2019.  All data is available to the public and can be found on the government’s gender pay gap website.  I have downloaded this data and created a spreadsheet tool to present the data in a more user-friendly and visual format.

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UK Weather Trends #4 – Winter 2018

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Meteoologists define winter in the UK to be the period from December to February so winter is now over and we are officially in spring.  The 2018 winter was very sunny but this hides the fact that our winter climate has changed quite notably over the last 25 years.

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UK Weather Tracker #12 – January 2018

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Every time I went online in January, I would find a headline promising an extreme cold snap in the UK which never materialised.  I’ve grown tired and cynical of these headlines and given that the latest met office data shows that January 2018 was completely unremarkable, I think I am justified in this attitude! [Read more…] about UK Weather Tracker #12 – January 2018