CheckMate

You know how I’m always telling you to look closely at numbers? Well, here’s yet another example…

I just ran across the Association for Financial Professionals’ 2008 Women in Finance Survey results under this headline in a MarketWatch story a couple days ago:

“Financial Professionals See Continued Weakness in U.S. Economy”

It’s full of statistics from the survey to back up that headline, including, perhaps most notably, this one:

“…89 percent of financial professionals expect their career to be impacted negatively as a result of the current economic slowdown…”

You have to go all the way to the bottom of the article to find the number that really got my attention, though, and the one I think is the most important statistic in the whole story:

“The 2008 AFP Women in Finance Survey, sponsored by Citi’s Global Transaction Services, asked 3,000 corporate practitioner members — evenly split between males and females — about the impact the current slowdown in the U.S. economy has had on job security and prospects for career advancement. The survey received 571 responses, with a response rate of 20 percent.”

Which means that all those numbers — and that headline — are based on a total of a whopping 571 people, and just one fifth of the total number of people they sent surveys to.

Now maybe a statistician would say that’s representative, but I’m not a statistician, and I have to tell you that I’m not so sure.

Hey, for all I know, the other 2429 people were too busy out making money to answer the survey…

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