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Excerpt from BU Today | By: Molly Callahan | June 4,<\/span>\u00a02025\u00a0| <\/span>Photo: Cydney Scott<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Workforce Council (BWWC).<\/p>\n 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\u2019s right to ask for salary ranges. The University\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThis report will help move Massachusetts forward as we tackle gender and racial wage disparities and inequities within the workplace,\u201d Lauren Jones, the state\u2019s secretary of labor and workforce development, said at the BU event.<\/p>\n The BU technology, a type of cryptographic technology known as secure multiparty computation, enables \u201ccompanies to work together in order to actually attack a bigger issue, one that a single individual could not have solved,\u201d says Azer Bestavros<\/a>, BU\u2019s associate provost for the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS) and one of the architects of the technology.<\/p>\n And while the name is a mouthful, the idea behind multiparty computation technology is pretty straightforward.<\/p>\n \u201cThe point of it is to enable collaboration,\u201d says Mayank Varia<\/a>, a CDS associate professor, who is leading the project for BU. \u201cYou 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.\u201d<\/p>\n