Beware The Energizer Bunny

Gender Quotients

Over at NZ Conservative, Andrei has published a cheeky little number.  Actually, we trust Andrei's life and slur insurance is paid up and ready to go, for he is living dangerously.  He has somewhat foolishly dared to criticise the established religion in Aotearoa.  Next he will be featured on I Shouldn't Be Alive.


The particular article in Aotearoa's secular creed  which Andrei has challenged is the official dogma of wimmin's equality in the workforce.  As our NZ readers will be aware there has been a bit of a stoush going on Down Under about whether female employees take more sick days than male.  The Public Service Association (a union of state sector employees) has done some statistical analysis and "proved" that the gender difference in sick days taken is so close as to be a rounding error.

In June 2010 the New Zealand public Service had 44,554 employees (full time equivalents). Of these 18,938 were male, 25,605 were female and there was 1 of unknown gender (only one - my we are backward).

According to the PSA there is "little difference" in statistics between male and females in terms of sick days. That being 6.8 sick days on average for males per annum compared to 8.4 days for females.

The first thing to note is that the government is hardly an equal opportunity employer.  Its gender balance is so skewed to women that its discriminatory practises in the workplace are plain and obvious to see.  For every 100 male employees in the state bureaucracy and its legion organs, there are 135 females.  Since being a bureaucrat requires neither special physical attributes nor intellectual achievement this discrepancy shows the government is discriminatory in its hiring policies. 

But Andrei's focus is on the rounding error. 

Therefore, stay with me here, there would have been 6.8* 18,938=128,778 days lost through male ill health in the public service last year or 352 man years of lost productivity.

And for females there would have been 8.6*25,605= 220,203 days lost through female ill health or 603 women years of lost productivity.

As an exercise for the reader we leave the calculation of how much smaller the Public Service could be if it only employed males.

Aint numbers fun.

It would appear that when you reach a 35 percent gender bias in favour of women in the work place, you will roughly double the number of person years lost through sickness and absences. We will call this the gender productivity quotient.  

But this sort of thing is playing with fire.  Andrei had better watch out.  Next thing, reality TV star, John-the-Energizer-Bunny Campbell will be dancing up and down like a preppy schoolboy outside Andrei's door, demanding that he given an account to the secular high priests for his misogynist views.