Pretend I’m the owner of a polling company that surveys political races. I prominently advertise my results: According to a Walt Hickey Polling Inc. survey of 600 likely voters, John Doe is beating Jane Doe 58 percent to 40 percent — John Doe will likely win the election. (Let’s say it’s a race for the U.S. Senate.)
But then you keep reading and you notice that the sample on which my poll is based consists of 400 men and 200 women. You can’t really tell whether I’m adjusting the numbers, and if so, how. Would you trust that number? Unless there’s some state I don’t know about where men outnumber women 2-to-1, you shouldn’t.
So why aren’t we more skeptical of movie ratings that do the same thing?
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Attempting to reflect a target population is a common practice in many fields that use surveys. It’s not clear to me why movie rating sites don’t do it — or, at the least, why they don’t indicate that their scores are almost all based mostly on the opinions of male users.
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