In July 2011, an Italian firm Ma-Vib was in the news for “sexual discrimination” for having chosen only its female employees to be dismissed. Before the layoff s, Ma-Vib employed 18 women and 12 men; it then fired 15 of the women and none of the men.
a. What proportion of the men were fired?
b. What proportion of the women were fired?
c. Find the difference in proportion of men and women fired. Suppose that we want to investigate whether the proportion of females fired was significantly higher than the proportion of males fired by Ma-Vib. That is, was the difference in proportions as reported in part (c) unlikely to have happened by chance alone if nothing suspicious was going on.
d. Give detailed, step-by-step instructions on how one could conduct a tactile simulation to generate a p-value to investigate whether the proportion of females fired was significantly higher than the proportion of males fired by Ma-Vib. Be sure to include details on the following:
• Would the simulation involve coins, dice, or index cards?
• How many tosses, rolls, or cards would be used?
• How many sets of tosses, rolls, or shuffles would you observe?
• What would you record aft er every repetition?
• How would you compute the p-value?