Lack of correlation does not imply causation
From the Herald
Labour’s support among men has fallen to just 23.9 per cent in the latest Herald-DigiPoll survey and leader David Cunliffe concedes it may have something to do with his “sorry for being a man” speech to a domestic violence symposium.
Presumably Mr Cunliffe did indeed concede it might have something to do with his statement; and there’s no way to actually rule that out as a contributing factor. However
Broken down into gender support, women’s support for Labour fell from 33.4 per cent last month to 29.1 per cent; and men’s support fell from 27.6 per cent last month to 23.9 per cent.
That is, women’s support for Labour fell by 4.2 percentage points (give or take about 4.2) and men’s by 3.7 percentage points (give or take about 4.2). This can’t really be considered evidence for a gender-specific Labour backlash. Correlations need not be causal, but here there isn’t even a correlation.
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 »
Wouldn’t this one break more on ideological/social conservatism lines than gender? Twitter had lots of men and women supporting his statement; I expect it would have been similarly unpopular with both genders in one labour cohort: socially conservative blue collar union workers.
10 years ago
That certainly could have happened — and it has the advantage over the actual claim in the paper that they don’t report any evidence against it.
10 years ago
Yeah, I picked up the same blindingly obvious error, Thomas.
Extraordinary that they couldn’t see what was right there in front of them.
I’ve read a number of articles from various media organisations all making a similar claim. And yet not only do you have this Herald-DigiPoll suggesting a slightly greater drop in Labour support among women than men, but also the latest Fairfax-Ipsos (which found a mild increase* in Labour support) suggested men were returning to Labour in slightly greater numbers than women.
*(albeit within margin of error territory)
10 years ago