Tag Archives: inequality

Most countries score an F on our LGBT human rights report card is a recent article in The Conversation.

Our research gives most countries in the world a failing grade in LGBTQ rights, reflecting widespread persecution of sexual minorities. Only one country in 10 actively protects the human rights of sexual minorities.

The article includes three charts with data that can be used in a statistics or QL based course.  There is also a link to the related paper, Human Rights and the Global Barometer of Gay Rights (GBGR): A Multi-Year Analysis, that describes the methodology used in the rankings.

EPI released a must read report early this month titled the Class of 2017. This is a long report with 17 graphs of historical trends, with data, related to employment of recent college grads. For example, figure F provides unemployment rates for young college graduates by race and ethnicity (Black, Hispanic, and White). The graph provides historical trends and notes that young graduates of color have higher unemployment rates. Other highlights from the report:

The overall unemployment rates and idling rates of young graduates mask substantial racial and ethnic disparities in these measures.

Young graduates are burdened by substantial student loan balances.

The wage gap between male and female young high school graduates has narrowed since 2000, while the wage gap between male and female young college graduates has widened.

Wages have stagnated—or fallen—for most young graduates since 2000.

There is an abundance of information and data in this report that can be used in math or QL based courses.

A recent EPI report notes: Straight out of college, women make about $3 less per hour than men.

Right out of college, young men are paid more than their women peers—which is surprising given that these recent graduates have the same amount of education and a limited amount of time to gain differential experience.

What may be worth exploring is the historic difference in starting pay between women and men, which you can do since the data is available and can easily be placed into Excel.

If you are looking for data on wealth and income inequality visit the World Wealth and Income Database. You can create graphs and download the data. For example, the graph here is pre-tax share of income for the top 1% (20.2% in 2014) and bottom 50% (12.6% in 2014) of adults in the U.S. The trends since 1980 are roughly linear and so the data, which you can download in a number of formats, can be used for regression. Once you have the lines, they can be used in other places in the curriculum. Other categories exist including wealth instead of income and groups such as the top 10% or middle 40%.

Stats classes are always looking for interesting data. One place to look in YouGov. For example, they did a poll (Note: it is not clear how the sample was obtained but they do provide a sample size.) asking people if life is fair.  Here are the results by gender.

1. Do you think life is fair or not fair?

You are set for a statistical test comparing Male vs Female perception of life being fair or not. This now allows for a discussion of why women would respond differently than men. One extra bonus on the site is you can look at the same questions broken down by other categories including income. Go to the YouGov Results page to see the data they have.

The Economic Policy Institute has a State of Working America Data Library. Here you will find downloadable excel files on employment and wages by race and gender.  For example, you might be interested in the median hourly wages for men and women over time (see the graph – you can guess which is women and men). Not only is the data suitable for regression, but also for rich discussion on equality and policy.  This data set will get added to the statistics material pages.