Simpson's paradox

Significant effects between two variables, a bivariate relationship, may in some cases be due to a third variable. Such a third variable is called a lurking variable and explains the relationship between the two other variables. This phenomenon is also known as Simpson's paradox.

One of the best known real-life examples of Simpson's paradox occured when the University of California, Berkeley was sued for bias against women who had applied for admission to graduate school there. In this exercise and the next one to come we will work with this example. The frequency table is displayed below:

As one can see, men clearly have a higher admission ratio than women. Is there a causal relationship between gender and graduate school admission ratio or is this a correlation?

Possible Answers

There is a causal relationship here between gender and the graduate school admission ratio
There is a correlation between gender and the graduate school admission ratio

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Exercise

Simpson's paradox

Instructions

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