Hariri Institute Helps Makes Equal Pay a Reality for The Boston Women’s Workforce Council
On March 28, 2016, Boston Mayor Martin Walsh signed the Boston Women’s Workforce Councils 100% Talent Compact. The 100% Talent Compact is an effort to close the gender pay gap by anonymously collecting wage data in real time and by working with employers to implement research-tested interventions.
The Boston Women’s Workforce Council will use a simple algorithm to collect wage data from companies without revealing individual company’s proprietary information, which originally posed an issue as companies did not want to risk their payrolls being disclosed.
The algorithm was developed by Azer Bestavros, Founding Director of the Hariri Institute, and the software to implement the algorithm was created by Andrei Lapets, Director of Research Development at the Hariri Institute alongside two BU students.
The algorithm, which is a multiparty computation, works by using random numbers to camouflage the data and keep the company’s pay information private.
Read more about the algorithm and the Boston Women’s Workforce Council’s endeavor to improve pay equality here.
