Abstract: In this conversation I outline three types of administrative data, typically collected by governments for regulatory or tax purposes that may have applications at the intersection of data discovery methods and goals of producing more equitable societies. The first is narrative and fixed quantitative data collected by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on discrimination complaints. Here the research question is can we use machine learning to improve the processing of discrimination complaints? The second, is also EEOC collected firm level data on demographic patterns of occupational segregation and pay disparities. A potential research question is can we identify and predict high inequality, perhaps high discrimination workplaces? The final are population registries, not available in the US but increasingly available in other countries. Can we identify system level equity dynamics between households, schools, communities, employers, and state income transfer systems?
Bio: Don Tomaskovic-Devey studies the processes that generate workplace inequality. He is the founding Director of the UMass Center for Employment Equity and the coordinator of the Comparative Organizational Inequality Network. He has projects on the impact of financialization upon U.S. income distribution, workplace desegregation and equal opportunity, network models of labor market structure, and relational inequality as a theoretical and empirical project. His long-term agenda is to work with others to move the social science of inequality to a more fully relational and organizational stance. He is advancing this agenda through empirical studies of jobs and workplaces, as well as social relationships between jobs within workplaces and the social relationships that link organizations to each other. This agenda is supported by principled theory and methodological projects. He is best known for his contributions to Relational Inequality Theory as well as organizational sampling and measurement methods. He is a founding member of the UMass Computational Social Science Institute. He is also a founding member of the EEODataNet, a network of researchers using data from and for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. His testimony before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission can be found here. Lunch will be served.