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
I went to a talk this week at my son’s school by Paul Dillon, from Drug and Alcohol research training Australia. I had heard great things about Paul as a speaker, but not the thing that impressed me most – he had great statistics! So time for a blog postContinue Reading
Depending on how you measure it, Australia is generally in the top 5 countries in the world for life expectancy. And we continue to improve. But Australia shamefully has an enormous gap in life outcomes between indigenous and non indigenous people. And over the period that of these statistics, while both indigenous and non indigenous mortality has improved, the gap has widened, with standardised indigenous death rates going from 164% of non indigenous rates to 172% of non indigenous rates between 2003 and 2017. So we may be the lucky country, but we certainly aren’t lucky for everyone.Continue Reading
Factfulness, Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think by Hans Rosling (with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund) Hans Rosling is the person who introduced me to Ted Talks, with this classic talk on visualising the world through statistics. I’ve used it aContinue Reading
I rarely see mortality statistics from Australia. So here from Actuarial Eye is an infographic you can use whenever someone wants to know just how afraid of crocodiles they should be. Wishing an enjoyable festive season to all of my readers – and try and avoid all of theseContinue Reading
Prompted by a friend, I’ve been taking a look at the data for NSW school suspensions, particularly for aboriginal students. You have to get deep into the NSW Board of Education website to do this (and convert pdfs into excel spreadsheets!) but it is worth it. In Australia, we haveContinue Reading
When I’m looking for inspiration for a post, I occasionally wander through the ABS website. If you’ve never tried it – have a look! It’s amazing what you can find there. So the Actuaries Digital editorial team asked me when I was going to post about the census. Sadly theContinue Reading