Wouldnt mean salary be a better representation of the public then median?
In: Other
In addition to what others have said about outliers, in context of salary, the difference from a “medium” salary to a very high salary is much different than to a low salary. This makes the mean likely to be higher than what people would usually think of as an average salary.
For example, if you have 10 people making the following:
$3,000
$25,000
$40,000
$40,000
$40,000
$75,000
$75,000
$100,000
$200,000
$3,000,000
The mean is $359,800 – it doesn’t accurately reflect anyone in the group. Even if you took the second and third highest and made them zero earners, the highest has skewed it so far that the mean is still $329,800. It took just one very high earner to shift the mean more than the zeros can offset.
The median on the other hand moves up and down a couple spots if you add really high or really low earners, but if there’s a consistent(ish) middle, it will still be roughly in the middle. And the highest earners won’t push it so far out of that range.
Averages are averages, they give us a simpler way to absorb data but can’t give a full picture of complex information. The types of numbers you’re working with can make mean or median better reflect the information you want to talk about. Sometimes outliers balance each other and the mean is useful. Sometimes they don’t.
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