Executive Tenure/Divorce The author of this response is asked to analyze the tenure and divorce happenstance for eight executives and draw any relevant conclusions about the data and its patterns. The author is asked to ask about the correlation or even causality between tenure as an executive and divorce. The correlation is to be defined in terms of magnitude, direction and practical importance. The question of how much of whether executives have been divorced can be accounted for by the length of their tenure is posed as well as how much of tenure can be explained by whether there has been a divorce.

Formulas & Analysis of Data

In looking at the data, it is not hard to see that executives with tenure have a higher prevalence of divorce than those that do not. For example, of the five executives with over 10 years of service, only one is not divorced. None of the executives below 10 years, three in total are divorced as of yet but it is notable that they are very close to the 10-year mark themselves with all three of them being within a year of the ten-year mark.

Put another way, the average age of people that are divorced is 10.6875 years (11 + 11.5 + 10 + 10.25 = 42.75 / 4 = 10.6875) whereas the average age of those not divorced is 9.5625 (9 + 9.5 + 9.75 + 10 = 38.25 / 4 = 9.5625). On both of those calculations, the four tenure amounts for each group are added together and then divided...

As for what is the best procedure to measure divorce, the above use of averages is probably the best and most appropriate since there are only 8 values and the divorce/non-divorce ratio is 1:1 in nature (MathIsFun.com, 2013).
It is also clear, really without doing ANY math, that people with higher tenure are clearly more likely to be divorced than people that are a bit lower but it is notable that the spread between the former and the latter is not all that wide. It stands to reason that the four non-divorced people will soon be divorced within the next year or two across the board as there is not a single person with 10.25 years or more tenure that is not yet divorced at this point. The highest person that is not divorced is only 3 months behind the first person that is divorced.

In terms of magnitude, the amount of years that tends to speak of divorce and that of non-divorce, at least in this data set, is rather narrow. In terms of practical importance, it is fairly clear a decade is pretty much the ostensible breaking point for this data set but that certainly may not apply for other companies and/or other situations. In terms of direction, it is clear that executives that approach a decade of service are at an extremely high risk (although not a certainty) of getting divorced. There was…