Wouldnt mean salary be a better representation of the public then median?
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I had this explained to me by using Univ of North Carolina Business Majors from a particular year. I forget the exact numbers but the mean was super high because one of the people included was Michael Jordan, who made incredibly more than the others for reasons that had nothing to do with his degree. So median was much more representative as it wasn’t impacted by that outlier.
Let’s say you have a company with 10 employees.
1. $1 salary
2. $2 salary
3. $3 salary
4. $4 salary
5. $5 salary
6. $6 salary
7. $7 salary
8. $8 salary
9. $9 salary
10. $100 salary
The median salary is $5. The mean salary is $14.5 . Which do you think better represents the “average” salary?
Take median and compare it to mean.
If the mean is significantly higher than the median, it’s very likely outliers are skewing it upward, and conversely, if the mean is significantly lower than the median, then outliers are likely skewing downward.
If they’re roughly at the same level, then there’s an even enough distribution around the sample size to negate any outliers.
That depends on what you are trying to emphasise. Median income is a better measure of “average” IMO because huge outliers at the top end push up mean salary.
Quite the opposite, actually.
If I present to you a group of 10 people who have $10, $10, $10, $10, $10, $10, $10, $10, $10 and $1,000,000, and ask you “how much money does the average or typical person in this group have?”, you would almost certainly say $10, right? The mean average of that group is $100,009. If I answered $100,009, you’d look at me funny. The median, on the other hand, is $10.
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