Does eye color depend on Gender? It Might Depend on Who or How you Ask

Abstract

As a part of an opening course survey, data on eye color and gender were collected from students enrolled in an introductory statistics course at a large university over a recent four year period. Biologically, eye color and gender are independent traits. However, in the data collected from our students, there is a statistically significant dependence between the two variables. In this article, we present two ideas for using this data set in the classroom, and explore the potential reasons for the dependence between the two variables in the population of our students.