At the May 30 debut event were Evelyn Murphy (from left), president of The WAGE Project, Inc., and a former Massachusetts lieutenant governor; Azer Bestavros (center), BU associate provost for computing and data sciences and a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor; Lauren Jones, Mass. secretary of labor and workforce development; Brooke Thomson, president and CEO of Associated Industries of Massachusetts; and Neha Gondal, associate professor of sociology in CAS and of computing & data sciences in CDS.

University News

BU Data Platform Will Help Massachusetts Track, and Work to Close, Wage Gaps

CDS researchers selected to extend across the state an encrypted data program already in use to track the gender and racial wage gaps in Boston

After a highly competitive process, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts selected Boston University to develop the data platform that will underpin new wage equity legislation and lead to the creation of reports it hopes to use to close the Massachusetts wage gap. 

Wage equity remains a stubborn labor issue the commonwealth is determined to address. According to the most recent report available, women in Greater Boston earn 79 cents for every dollar a man makes. This difference becomes more pronounced when comparing white men and women of color. Black women make 46 cents to the dollar, and Hispanic and Latina women, 48 cents, according to the Boston Women’s Workforce Council (BWWC).

Signed into law by Governor Maura Healey last summer, the legislation is designed to increase equity and transparency in pay by requiring employers to disclose salary ranges and to protect an employee’s right to ask for salary ranges. The University’s partnership with the commonwealth officially started in January, and it was discussed in detail at an event at the Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences at BU on May 30. 

“This report will help move Massachusetts forward as we tackle gender and racial wage disparities and inequities within the workplace,” Lauren Jones, the state’s secretary of  labor and workforce development, said at the BU event.

The new law requires public and private employers with 25 or more employees to disclose pay ranges in job postings, provide the pay range of a position to an employee who is offered a promotion or transfer, and on request, provide the pay range to employees who already hold that position or are applying for it. 

The legislation also requires public and private employers with 100 or more employees to submit wage data reports to the office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, which will then be published through aggregate wage reports by the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development.

At the end of May, the Healey-Driscoll administration released the 2025 Massachusetts Workforce Data Report, the inaugural analysis of the demographic makeup of the workforce in the commonwealth. The report, which is exclusively a survey of employers with 100 or more workers, shows some promising signs, including gender balance in the private sector, and greater workforce diversity among Massachusetts’ largest employers. It also highlights some areas of improvement: there are persistent occupational disparities—Black and Hispanic workers remain overrepresented in lower-wage roles while white men remain overrepresented in senior executive roles—and women remain significantly underrepresented in traditional male-dominated fields, such as construction, mining, and utilities. 

The new report is the first step, officials say. Ongoing reporting that dives into wage disparities is at the heart of the legislation—and is still in progress.

Boston University’s role comes into play in the creation of those aggregate wage reports. A group of researchers within the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences developed an encrypted program that anonymizes demographic and salary information, and enables anyone—sociologists, state officials—to query the database for high-level aggregate trends. It means that companies of all sizes, most of them reluctant to release sensitive information publicly, can comply with the law and safely deposit that information into this database—and the information is accessible (in aggregate) to researchers and public officials. (The BU work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA].)

“This effort reflects our commitment to data-driven policymaking,” says Josh Cutler, Massachusetts undersecretary of labor. “We’re deeply grateful to the employers who participated and to our partners at Boston University and the Boston Women’s Workforce Council for helping us build a secure model for workforce data collection.”

The BU technology, a type of cryptographic technology known as secure multiparty computation, enables “companies to work together in order to actually attack a bigger issue, one that a single individual could not have solved,” says Azer Bestavros, BU’s associate provost for the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS) and one of the architects of the technology. 

And while the name is a mouthful, the idea behind multiparty computation technology is pretty straightforward. 

“The point of it is to enable collaboration,” says Mayank Varia, a CDS associate professor, who is leading the project for BU. “You can have a bunch of people, all of whom have data that they believe is sensitive, and it can be used towards a data-science analysis of something that would be socially beneficial.”

In this case, that social benefit is an understanding of the Massachusetts gender and racial pay gaps. And that understanding of the landscape is an important step in closing the gaps. 

The technology developed at BU works like this: companies mask their pay totals across various demographics (race, gender, etc.) by adding huge random numbers to them. The newly disguised totals go to the BU server and the random numbers to an independent third party, which then adds the random numbers from all companies and sends them to BU. The server at BU can then compute the aggregate difference between male and female (or white and Black) salaries, without ever knowing the pay totals from any individual company.

Varia offers an illustrative, if simplified, metaphor for the way this technology works: imagine there are 10 people standing in a circle. They want to know what the average salary is among the group, but nobody wants to tell anyone else their own salary. So, the first person takes their real salary, adds a random value (that only they know), and reports this new figure to the person next to them. The second person adds their real salary to that initial figure, and reports the new sum to the third person—and on, and on, until it reaches back to the first person in the circle. Now, that first person can subtract the random value from the final number to determine the actual sum of all 10 people’s salaries, without ever knowing any individual’s pay. 

“But the piece that is really important to us is this idea of publishing a report that the entire world can read about how the state is doing when it comes to wage equity—but without exposing the private data of individual companies,” Bestavros says.

The technology created at BU, soon to be deployed across the commonwealth, has already been in use in Greater Boston for the better part of a decade. 

In 2015, the University partnered with the BWWC to help assess the gender wage gap across different business sectors throughout the city and surrounding municipalities. These measurements, published in a series of biennial reports, form the foundation of any plans to reach pay equity. 

The new law essentially extends this research approach beyond Boston, to across the entire commonwealth.

“Gender and racial gaps in representation and wages exist in every state. But Massachusetts is now the only state publicly reporting these gaps year after year,” said BWWC cochair Evelyn Murphy at the law’s signing. “It’s one thing to say we’re for fairness and equity, but it’s another to document that fairness and equity. We will be doing that now to honor our commitment to women and people of color working in Massachusetts and say to the rest of the country: take a look at Massachusetts, because there are real opportunities here to be treated fairly.”