Multi-Party Computation Software to Evaluate Pay Equity in the City of Boston

Principal Investigator

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  Andrei Lapets

  2015 Early Stage Urban Research Award Recipient; Lecturer of Computer Science; Fellow at Hariri Institute

Co-Principal Investigator

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  Azer Bestavros

  Associate Provost for Computing & Data Sciences; Warren Distinguished Professor of Computer Science; Founding Director of the BU Hariri Institute for Computing

Continuing a project that began in November 2014, Professor and Hariri Institute Director Azer Bestavros sought to create a proprietary software tool to enable area corporate employers to anonymously share employee wage data by gender, race/ethnicity, and level. The goal is to track the gender wage gap across thousands of employees in the Boston region over time, as employers introduce evidence-based interventions to remedy the gap. More than 60 local companies are involved in the project, including Raytheon, State Street, and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

This project uses data from the Boston Women’s Workforce Council, an advisory body for the Boston Mayor’s Office based out of Simmons College. Andrei Lapets, a fellow at the Hariri Institute and a CAS computer sciences lecturer, developed the software alonside students Kyle Holzinger (CAS ’16) and Eric Dunton (CAS ’15).

Publications

Technical Report: Lapets, Andrei; Dunton, Eric; Holzinger, Kyle; Jansen, Frederick; Bestavros, Azer. Web-based Multi-Party Computation with Application to Anonymous Aggregate Compensation Analytics, August 15, 2015.

Media Releases

Calculating Gender Pay Equity, BU Today
Computational Thinking Breaks a Logjam, BU Today
Mayor Walsh Pushes to Gather Data on Gender Wage Gap, Boston Globe

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