how HESA normalises black, mixed and other ethnic group graduates to reduce their impact by a quarter! http://bit.ly/gsVwv

Or, at least that is one possible reading of this following example from HESA's Guidelines for the use of the DLHE Longitudinal Survey Dataset.

To illustrate how this is done:

 Black, mixed and other ethnic group graduates accounted for 21.9% of the selected Sample A.

  From the initial census it is known that these graduates represent just 4.9% of all graduates

 To ensure that these graduates feature in the analysis in their correct proportion, the 'black', 'mixed ethnic group' and 'other ethnicity' graduates in the sample would be given a weight of 4.9/21.9.


You mean weight the black results by 5/20 because there were too many of them? How was the sample A selected? What is the correct proportion? Maybe this was something they cared about? This is a small example of how marginalised groups may appear to have to work five times as hard just to be level.

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Posted 3 months ago

The Equality Trust

We believe that in order to gain substantial improvements in the real quality of life of the populations of developed countries it is necessary that differences in income and wealth are greatly reduced.

OK, so we joke about how we have the randiest teenage liggers in Europe, can out-belch the Belgians and who would want perfect teef anyway? But inequality in society makes life worse for all, and - as you would expect - those on the lower end of the scale get a disproportionately worse deal than those at the top. The Thatcherite monetarist nostrum that, "... a rising tide floats all the boats..." is not true. To keep the metaphor, there is now very good evidence in Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level (Penguin 2009), that lower tides and longer mooring lines are what we need.

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Posted 4 months ago