{"id":17291,"date":"2015-05-07T12:03:47","date_gmt":"2015-05-07T16:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/systems\/?p=17291"},"modified":"2021-02-06T11:26:19","modified_gmt":"2021-02-06T16:26:19","slug":"computational-thinking-breaks-a-logjam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/computational-thinking-breaks-a-logjam\/","title":{"rendered":"Computational Thinking Breaks a Logjam"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"v_14-8259-DATASCI-038\"
Photo by Cydney Scott<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hariri Institute helps address Boston’s male-female pay gap<\/strong>
\nBy: Rich Barlow
\nAfter confidentiality concerns stalled Boston\u2019s gender pay initiative, computer scientist Azer Bestavros proposed an algorithm that solved the problem.<\/p>\n

Marty Walsh had a problem. Boston\u2019s mayor wanted to address pay disparities between men and women, publicizing, as a first step, the average gap in different Boston industries. Normally, calculating that gap would require taking the actual pay gap at each company in an industry, adding them up, and then dividing by the number of companies to reach an average. But companies\u2019 payrolls are proprietary, because their disclosure could be a boon to competitors, a black eye for the firms, and ammo for disgruntled employees who could sue over pay inequities.<\/p>\n

Even if firms could trust a third party that swore secrecy to look at their numbers and calculate industry averages, hackers might breach that party\u2019s online security and steal these precious informational nuggets.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo this project hit a hurdle,\u201d says Azer Bestavros (Computer Science, SE), director of BU\u2019s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering<\/strong>. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t going to happen unless there was a way to do it, and there didn\u2019t seem to be a way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Enter Bestavros, a College of Arts and Sciences computer science professor, who proposed an ingeniously simple algorithm from computer science that will allow the city to calculate those industry pay averages, by gender, from a total of 60 participating employers, without any daylight shining on an individual company\u2019s proprietary information. BU students and a Hariri colleague developed software to perform the algorithm<\/p>\n

How did Bestavros do it? Participating employers will enter the following data (for simplicity\u2019s sake, let\u2019s say we need to compare the salaries of male versus female software engineers, by computing the average salary across all participating companies of male and of female software engineers): Each company computes the sum of the salaries of all of its male software engineers (call that M) and the sum of the salaries of all of its female software engineers (call that F). Then each company, independently, chooses two extremely large random numbers and adds one of these random numbers to its M sum and the other to its F sum and sends the results to the BU computer server. The server totals all the sums to get two numbers, X and Y.<\/p>\n

Separately, using an intermediary, the companies add up their random numbers for males and their random numbers for females to obtain two other numbers (call them V and W) and sends those to the BU server. The BU server would then subtract V from X to obtain the sum of the salaries of all male software engineers across all companies, and would subtract W from Y to obtain the sum of the salaries of all female software engineers across all companies. Camouflaged by the random numbers and these mathematical steps, each company\u2019s pay information remains undisclosed. The software was developed by Andrei Lapets, a fellow at the Hariri Institute and a CAS computer sciences lecturer, and students Kyle Holzinger (CAS\u201916) and Eric Dunton (CAS\u201915).<\/p>\n

This kind of algorithm, called multiparty computation, exemplifies how \u201ccomputational thinking\u201d<\/strong> can solve problems heretofore deemed insurmountable, Bestavros says. (Computational thinking involves reasoning with abstract information in ways common to mathematics and computer science.)
\n\u201cSociety thinks that things cannot be done when they can,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s not magic. It\u2019s a simple algorithm.\u2026We can compute things that would seem impossible to compute, given the constraints.\u201d
\nThe city will collect the data early this summer and publish a report once it\u2019s analyzed. Participating employers have agreed to work towards pay equity, including anonymously reporting their salary information every two years to the Boston Women\u2019s Workforce Council<\/strong>, an advisory body to Walsh based at Simmons College that\u2019s overseeing the pay equity initiative. (Demonstrating his commitment, Walsh gave raises to two high-ranking female staffers.) The data will not only reveal gender comparisons, but also demographic ones\u2014for example, the difference in pay between black men and black women in comparable jobs.<\/p>\n

BU is not among the participants, but its affiliated teaching hospital, Boston Medical Center, is taking part, as are several educational institutions. Among other employers participating are the city, State Street, Raytheon, Putnam Investments, MassMutual Financial Group, and Blue Cross Blue Shield.<\/p>\n

The city says white women workers in Boston make 83 cents for each dollar that men make, with women of color faring even worse<\/strong>. Hoping to address that, the Women\u2019s Workforce Council spent more than a year brainstorming with global experts in fruitless pursuit of a data-gathering method that would ensure employers\u2019 confidentiality, says executive director Christina Knowles.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt proved impossible to find a solution\u2014until we were introduced to Professor Bestavros,\u201d she says. He and his BU colleagues \u201chave been absolutely vital to our work. We owe our progress on this innovative and groundbreaking project\u201d to them. Knowles says the project is the first of its kind in the country.
\nThe city\u2019s gender pay initiative began under Walsh\u2019s predecessor, the late Thomas Menino (Hon.\u201901). After leaving the mayoralty, Menino was codirector of BU\u2019s Initiative on Cities<\/strong>, whose executive director, Katherine Lusk, hooked up Bestavros with the Workforce Council after its data-gathering effort had stalled.<\/p>\n

Rich Barlow can be reached at barlowr@bu.edu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hariri Institute helps address Boston’s male-female pay gap By: Rich Barlow After confidentiality concerns stalled Boston\u2019s gender pay initiative, computer scientist Azer Bestavros proposed an algorithm that solved the problem. Marty Walsh had a problem. Boston\u2019s mayor wanted to address pay disparities between men and women, publicizing, as a first step, the average gap in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1500,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26],"tags":[156,132],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1500"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17291"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30588,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17291\/revisions\/30588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}