Following a series of suicides in the French telephone company France Telecom, there have been attempts at explaining what was perceived as an unusually high rate of suicide within a company: 24 suicides over 18 months, i.e. about 15 per year for a company of 100,000 employees. Without going into these analyses, I want to focus on the recent outcry provoked by the “analysis” of a French statistician, René Padieu, that follows simply reproduces an earlier remark by the New York TImes:
“In statistical terms, the 24 suicides at France Télécom since February 2008 — including eight since the beginning of summer, with the latest confirmed on Monday — are not extraordinary for a company employing 102,0000 people in France.” New York Times, Sept. 29, 2009.
Several other statisticians have already commented on this very crude extrapolation, including Avner Bar-Hen who is the current president of the French Statistical Society (FSDS). (See also the Désintox column in Libération.) It indeed does not make sense to compare the suicide rate of a global population, whose causes are immensely diverse, to a wave of job related suicides within a single company. Especially when considering that a large majority of the suicides was by men over 50… What’s most definitely annoying is that biased use of statistical reasonning from someone signing his tribune as affiliated to the French Statistics Institute (INSEE) and the French Statistical Society (FSDS)—as the president of the deontology commission!. And thus mistakenly involves both institutions...
Ps-There is actually a column in Le Monde of October 26, with the same title as this post and whose argument completely makes my point: by accepting the statistician’s arguments of René Padieu, the columnist argues that statistics has clear limitations for this type of debate and he ends up with Disraeli’s quote about lies and statistics… The disservice to the profession due to such an un-professional attitude is therefore terrible!
