I'm not a statistician, but my belief is this.
Statistics do not lie, but Statisticians decide which statistics to show.
It is unethical to give fake numbers, you will lose all your credibility.
But having the data, you can decide which statistics to show. That could be misleading, but it is not wrong. ^_^
I have plenty of tricks under my sleeves, having being working for 5 years. Today, Professor Shingo T will teach you the difference between Mean (aka arithmetic average) and Median.
Picture stolen from Momo's website
This is something that most of you kids have learnt in school. Let's just do a quick revision and see how you can use this to your advantage.
The mean is the sum of all the numbers divided by the number of numbers.
Suppose A, B, C, D and E earn $2000, $2500, $3000, $3500 and $4000 respectively a month.
It means the average earning is ($2000 + $2500 + $3000 + $3500 + $4000)/5 = $3000.
The median is the middle value of a list of numbers in a sorted list (aka 50th percentile value).
For the above example, C's pay of $3000 is in the middle.
Thus Median = $3000.
For this case, the mean and median are equal.
But in real-life, these 2 values are hardly equal, due to some form of biased variance. Outliers are evil.
Imagine A, B, C, D and E earns $2300, $2400, $2600, $2700 and $10000 respectively in an organisation. Obviously E is the manager, while A-D are the employees of the company.
The mean salary is $4000.
The median salary is $2600.
So what the company does is to tell the whole world that their average salary is $4000 for their company. This is not wrong, but the truth is only 1 guy gets more than $4000, the rest all get less than that amount.
The median will be more reflective to take care of this outlier.
The number of people who get < $2600 = The number of people who get > $2600
The morale of the story?
Median > Average => The people "on top" are earning much more than the people "below".
Work hard for your pay increment.
Because you need lots of it to catch up with your manager's pay, and more to catch up with the CEO etc....
No worries, you can keep trying till you hit 62.
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