BU Today Profiles BWWC Partnership with Institute
Mayor Martin J. Walsh and the Boston Women’s Workforce Council (BWWC) released a first-of-its-kind gender wage gap report in early January, while at the same time announcing a new partnership that would move the BWWC to the Hariri Institute for Computing. BU Today covered the work of the BWWC and Hariri Institute in developing a secure, multi-party computation platform to analyze propriety payroll data from numerous Boston area companies:
Payroll data for 112,600 area employees reveals that women working in greater Boston make just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to a new report from the Boston Women’s Workforce Council. That calculation was made possible by researchers at BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, who came up with a secure way for companies to report the data anonymously.
“This report is the first of its kind in the country, the first time actual wage data has been reported both anonymously and voluntarily,” Mayor Martin J. Walsh said in announcing the report. “This is a groundbreaking moment in tackling the gender gap.”
MaryRose Mazzola, executive director of the council, which is now housed at the Hariri Institute, says BU’s computing expertise “was absolutely crucial,” in enabling the report.
“What we were looking for didn’t exist yet, and we had to have Hariri essentially make it for us,” says Mazzola. “It’s the only way we can collect this unique data and make all the companies comfortable with participating.”
Payroll data is among the most closely guarded information at any company and is almost always hidden from the prying eyes of competitors without and employees within. Previous salary studies have depended on surveys that simply ask employees to volunteer their pay amount. But Hariri computer scientists created a secure way to collect data from company payrolls, then tested the technology with council lead sponsors State Street Corporation, MassMutual Financial Group, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Putnam Investments, and Partners HealthCare. The results persuaded dozens more of the metro area’s largest employers to share salary data. In all, 69 companies, representing 11 percent of the area workforce and almost $11 billion in annual earnings, participated in the survey.
Employers “trusted us to take that data and make it anonymous and aggregate it so it can serve a common business and public purpose,” says council cochair Evelyn Murphy, a former Massachusetts lieutenant governor.
“The institute is very proud of this piece of work, because we can build on it,” says Azer Bestavros, the Hariri Institute director and a College of Arts & Sciences computer science professor. “We feel it has legs to apply to lots of social science problems and other applications.”