June 8, 2012

Fractional companies or fractional women?

We have a Stat of the Week submission, for the NZ Herald’s claim that

Of Australia’s top 200 listed companies, 12.7 per cent had female directors by the beginning of August, compared to 9.3 per cent for the top 100 listed companies here.

That is, 25.4 of the Australian companies and 9.3 of the NZ companies have female directors.  Perhaps the 0.3 is either only partly a company or partly female.

Or perhaps, since the story mentions earlier that about 9% of all private-sector directors are female, you might guess that 9.3% is the proportion of females among all directors of the NZ 100.  That implies the proportion of companies with at least one female director is almost certainly higher than 9%.

A little Googling confirms this: 43% of the NZ 100 companies (that’s 43 companies, for those of you playing along at home) have at least one female director. 13% have more than one.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »