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The pair-wise variability index has become a useful and widely used tool for comparing syllable timing of speech. In this paper we present an improved pair-wise variability index based on median instead of means that can more strongly amplify and reveal the differences in the timing characteristics of two datasets. Further, it places less stringent requirements on the pre-processing of the measurements, and it is therefore more robust to outliers in the dataset. The effectiveness of the new measure is demonstrated through an example where the measure is applied to data based on American English speech and Taiwan English speech. The results obtained with the improved pair-wise variability index are compared to those of the standard pair-wise variability index and the rhythm ratio.