Eugene Meidinger has a great post looking at DBA salaries for women versus men:
Goofy outliers are an issue, but the larger the dataset the smaller the issue. If Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average wealth in the bar goes up by a billion. If he walks into a football stadium, everyone gets a million dollar raise.
One way of looking at the issue is to compare the median to the mean. The median is the salary smack dab in the middle, whereas mean is what we normally think of when we think of average.
The median doesn’t care where Bill Gates is, but the mean is sensitive to outliers. If we compare the two, that should give us an idea if we have too much skew in either direction.
If you’re not well-versed in descriptive statistics, Eugene has a good, methodical process and explains each step well.