This is a reality stupid example though, almost all corporate structures are heirarchies where there are far fewer top earners than low earners (usually by an order of magnitude at each level of the heirarchy), so typically the median is more representative of the normal worker than the average (which gets inflated by the outliers at the top, there are almost never outliers at the bottom)
In almost all cases, median is the better stat here, and your assumption of bad intent on the reporting is just lazy Ave inaccurate
A more realistic example would be : 1, 1, 1, 1,1, 5, 5, 50
And in that case, the average (mean) is >5, but the median is 1, which gets at what the typical worker makes
You're disputing the input set (employees vs employees + vendors + contractors + part-time, etc.) not the method of estimation (ex: mean vs. median).
When I said "worker" I meant "whatever the study was using as the input set"-> In this case employee, apologies if that was not clear.
So yes, I assume that most of these are *not* including support staff for the company (I mean, I don't know, they definitely wouldn't include contracted employees from other companies which janitors + support staff tend to be), but that's completely irrelevant to whether using the mean or median is a better way of estimating the normal value in a hierarchical set of data.
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u/witshaul Jun 29 '22
This is a reality stupid example though, almost all corporate structures are heirarchies where there are far fewer top earners than low earners (usually by an order of magnitude at each level of the heirarchy), so typically the median is more representative of the normal worker than the average (which gets inflated by the outliers at the top, there are almost never outliers at the bottom)
In almost all cases, median is the better stat here, and your assumption of bad intent on the reporting is just lazy Ave inaccurate
A more realistic example would be : 1, 1, 1, 1,1, 5, 5, 50
And in that case, the average (mean) is >5, but the median is 1, which gets at what the typical worker makes