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Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great reference. I'm going to use it from now on too.
I won't claim to have fully internalized all of it, but Judea Pearl's book Causality is incredible.
But this is a great, fast example of why his work is important.
Judea Pearl has formalized a resolution to Simpson's Paradox: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.34.... An oversimplification of his idea would be to say that given assumptions about the causal independence of variables, it becomes clear which way you should group the data. Although it's not always possible to make these independence assumptions, much of the time they are obvious and uncontrover…
Well, it certainly makes more sense to look at the by department data rather than the aggregate data. But I would say that the fact that we see such large disparities in which departments are applied to is already enough to refute the idea that male and female applicants are pretty much the same, and that therefore it would be pretty reckless to conclude any sex discrimination based on the difference in acceptance ra…