Now the whole reason I wanted to track this down was because the claim that "women work harder than men" appeared to be based on the difference of a few seconds over the course of 10 minutes (2.5 minutes for women vs 2.1 minutes for men). Of course I wanted to see a p value here....they do know that's how we assess if the difference of 24 seconds actually means something right?
Alas, no. No p value. Just a one time 10 minute trial of who logged more keystrokes when a researcher was sitting nearby.
Also according to the study, people under 35 work harder than those over 35, and supervisors work harder than non-supervisors. What's weird is apparently the only metric used to assess "work" was keystrokes, and it doesn't appear anyone group spent more than an average 5 minutes out of 10 working, even with a researcher standing over their shoulder.
Alright, I know this whole study is one big advertisement for their privacy software, but they couldn't even give us a p value for how much better everyone did with their software? Why even use statistics if you're not going to at least pretend to be rigorous?
Must have been a man who put this together. Everyone knows they don't do much.*
*If you presume an 8 hour work day, and assume equal productivity across the day, the men in this office work 101 minutes to the women's 120 minutes. How the heck to I get a job where I only do 2 hours of work per day????
*If you presume an 8 hour work day, and assume equal productivity across the day, the men in this office work 101 minutes to the women's 120 minutes. How the heck to I get a job where I only do 2 hours of work per day????
We try not to get bogged down in things we won't get much credit for.
ReplyDeleteI would have commented from my work computer, but the monitoring program might have confused my typing for actual work being done...
ReplyDeletewarning - whinging ahead: i get more work done when nobody's around - in my private practice i assess students on saturday & sunday - b/c all the loud teacher-y ladies & all the loud students are gone! my office is in a non-profit learning center - full of amazing & committed teachers who verbalize frequently. i'm the only male. i get so much more done when i don't have to verbalize 8 minutes out of every hour (10 hour day = 80 mins verbalization:) also, since i work for myself (& have competition) that incentivizes me. which reminds me, thank you for the gov't website - i just wrote letters to our state's education committee which meets tomorrow on relaxing stringent restrictions on charter schools - which as a libertarian i'm all for (incentivize, increase competition, decrease monopoly, decrease gov't school indoctrination) b/c i've seen how that's played out in me - an ex-academic!
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