Logical Reasoning

PT111 · S3 · Q17 Only a very small percentage of

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Only a very small percentage of people from the service professions ever become board members of the 600 largest North American corporations.

Conclusion

People from service professions are underrepresented in the most important corporate boardrooms in N.A.

Evidence

Out of the 600 largest N.A. corporations, only a very small percentage of people from the service professions ever become board members.

Evaluate

The concept of "underrepresented" means that you are X % of the overall population, but less-than-X % of a certain subpopulation.

Maybe women are 53% of the population of a given country, but only 27% of judges are female. That shows that females are underrepresented in the judging profession.

It's hard for us to judge the author's claim of underrepresented, because we don't know what % of the population is from service professions. The author is evidently assuming that people from the service professions are more than only a very small percentage of people. That seems like a fair assumption, so maybe there's something else.

The author is also assuming that the boards of the 600 largest companies are the most important boards.

Goal

Look for an answer calling out one of the author's assumptions: "largest vs. most important", and .

But I wouldn't be surprised if the answer dealt with something else, since both of those feel like pretty reasonable assumptions.

17.

Which one of the following points out a flaw committed in the argument?

  1. Six hundred is too small

    Wrong Flaw

    This answer is trying to sell us on a Sampling Flaw (in which the sample is too small, biased, or unrepresentative). However, 600 is a fairly robust data sample, and since the author is talking about representation on the most important corporate boards, the Top 600 corporate boards definitely feels like an adequate sense of coverage. If the author had said, "Look, there are no service people on the Top 5 corporate boards", then we could complain about sample size.

    9% picked this

  2. Correct

    The percentage of people from

    Why this is right

    Some people probably caught this error on their initial read. I did not, but that's no obstacle to getting it right. We just have to consider what it's saying and ask ourselves, "Is this true? Does it describe a logic problem?" The author's first sentence is saying "Only a small % of people who work in service industry are in top corporate boardrooms." Well, naturally! Walmart may employ 1 million people, but only about 10-20 of them might sit on the corporate board. If we said, "Women are 53% of the population, but only 0.02% of female Walmart employees sit on the corporate board of Walmart. Thus, Walmart seems to be discriminating against women", that would be a crazy argument. We would need to say something more like, "53% of Walmart's employees are women, but only 20% of the board members are women." In this argument, we need to know what % of the population is service people, and what % of the board members are service people, in order to judge underrepresentation. But the author is giving us "what % of service people are on the board". 2% of US Senators are from Hawaii. 0.000001% of Hawaiians are US Senators. The statistic is drastically different if you present it backwards.

    Skill tested: Flaw · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    75% picked this

  3. It is a mistake to

    Wrong Flaw

    This is again accusing the author of a Sampling problem, saying that she's using the top 600 boardrooms to make a generalization about all boardrooms (inviting the objection that "the top boardrooms aren't representative of boardrooms more broadly"). But is the author's conclusion about corporate boardrooms generally? No, it's about the most impotant (i.e. the top 600) ones, so the author is never relying on the assumption that they're typical. She's only speaking to what's going on inside those top 600.

    13% picked this

  4. It is irrelevant to smaller

    Out of Scope: would agree

    No part of this argument is concerned with or affected by how willing anyone would be to change reality. The conclusion is just attempting to describe reality. We're only assessing if we've been convinced that service people are underrepresented. This trap answer is Going to the Next Thought, and talking about what if anything we could / should do about it.

    2% picked this

  5. The presence of people from

    Out of Scope: socially responsible

    That concept of "social responsibility" really comes out of left field. Nothing in the author's argument is dealing with that.

    1% picked this

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