The shocking murder of a woman and her three children by her ex-husband (and the children’s father) in Queensland this week has led to a lot of discussion of the statistics of family violence. The statistic I want to look at today is the deaths of children. The Drum onContinue Reading
Last week was the annual release of the Closing the Gap report. As the report describes: In 2007, Commonwealth, state, territory and local governments made a commitment to work together to close the gap in Indigenous disadvantage. This led to the National Indigenous Reform Agreement, a significant step toward moreContinue Reading
Get a bunch of actuaries together (particularly life insurance actuaries) and sooner or later we will start talking about pandemics. Fortunately for us, our experiences are almost entirely theoretical. We’ve lived through AIDS (for the life insurance actuary, a very slow-moving pandemic, where the challenge was more about underwriting thanContinue Reading
Climate change affects extremes more than you think. If the distribution shifts even a little bit to be hotter/wetter/drier/windier, then even without changing the likelihood of extremes, the very rare extremes we were used to become much more likely. Continue Reading
I’ve just published my annual round-up of my non fiction reading for last year here. Do go and read the whole post, but here I’ll just mention my absolute favourites for the year (or at least the ones I keep telling people to go and read). Continue Reading
Today’s Book Review is Men at Work: Australia’s Parenthood Trap, the latest Quarterly Essay by Annabel Crabb In a follow up essay to her previous book The Wife Drought, Annabel Crabb investigates what is stopping men taking on more of the parenting load. In the last 50 years, women haveContinue Reading
Why we Sleep; Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, by Matthew Walker Today’s book review is a topic close to my heart. Many people I work with have heard me say that my KPI for myself is that my team gets enough sleep. That is short hand for quiteContinue Reading
Sitting in a meeting of my industry peers this week, I did what I often did, and tried to count the proportion of women in the room. Luckily, for a change, I wasn’t the only woman. There were three of us out of 20! So I calculated the minimum numberContinue Reading
Read this book, and if you have any influence over data; its collection or its use; think honestly about whether you are considering women as much as men in the way you collect your data. And remember that the more often decision makers reflect the general population (whether by gender or other measures of diversity) the more likely it is that decisions will be good for that diverse population.Continue Reading
Recently the ATO released its annual statistics for the most recent tax year. You can find all sorts of statistics in the release here. I decided it was about time I updated anything I could find on actuarial pay, and particularly gender gaps. A couple of years ago, Julia LessingContinue Reading