Question

How do women and men compare in the pursuit of academic degrees? The table below present counts (in thousands) from the Statistical Abstract of degrees earned in 1996 categorized by the level of the degree and the sex of the recipient.

Bachelor Master Professional Doctorate Totals

Female 642 227 32 18

Male 522 179 45 27

Totals

i. Explain why sex is the independent variable.

j. Describe the differences in degree distribution between men and women. Use appropriate percentages.

k. Are these differences significant? Use an appropriate statistical test (with ? = 0.01) to determine whether sex and academic degree are independent.

l. Find lambda for this table. What does this tell us?

Answer 1

i)

Sex is independent variable, as doesn't depend on another variable like level of degree

j)

we see Male has higher proportion for Profession and Doctorate

k)

This can be using chi-square test of independence

TS = 9.514

p-value = 0.023 > alpha (0.01)

hence we fail to reject the null hypothesis

there is not sufficient evidence that to conlude that sex and academic degree are not independent.