Addressing Salary Equity in a Discrimination Lawsuit at Safecorp

Introduction and Importance

Salary equity at Safecorp You have been asked to provide statistical expertise in a lawsuit alleging discrimination against minority employees at Safecorp, a major banking institution.

One of the issues at stake is salary equity. Your clients, the plaintiffs’ lawyers, have supplied a random sample of records from 474 employees .

Nominal Your task is to address the following questions in a brief memo to the legal team:

• Are salaries for minority employees lower than those for majority employees?

• Do minority and majority employees differ with respect to characteristics that are associated with salary?

• Do differences in characteristics of minority and majority employees “explain” the lower salaries of minority employees?

Typically, memos of this sort are organized as follows:

1. Introduction. What are you going to talk about?

Why are these issues important?

(Note that because this is a statistics class, so keep this reasonably brief.)

2. Methods: What is your data source and approach for addressing these issues?

3. Findings: What did you find? (This section will be the bulk of your memo).

4. Conclusions: How do your findings address the issues that you outlined in the introduction? What do you conclude?

Briefly, what are the limitations of your analysis?

The memo should be 3-5 pages double spaced, with a 12 point font. If you can say what you want to say in 3 pages, that’s fine! You will submit two appendices to your memo. These won’t count toward your page limit.

5. Tables and/or figures. Include at least one table and/or set of figures that illustrate your findings. Tables and figures shouldn’t be Minitab output  they should be clearly constructed displays of information in plain English, accessible to your client audience.

Use MS Word to construct a table

6. Annotated Minitab output for your instructor’s review. Attach this as an additional appendix.

The annotations can be machine or handwritten on the output, and should guide your instructor in finding the analyses that you describe in your memo.

For example, in your memo, you might have a sentence like “Roses are exceptionally thorny. While x% of roses have thorns, only y% of ferns do”.

In your annotated output, jot something like: “Percent with thorns: ferns vs. roses”. This will help your instructor to see where you got your information.

Guidelines and hints In preparing any memo that includes statistical data, keep these points in mind:

A. Write at a level that your audience can appreciate. In this case, you are addressing people who are familiar with basic numerical concepts (averages, percents).

However, most are probably not aware of concepts like hypothesis testing, regression coefficients, and so on.

A big part of your assignment is to convey your findings, using words that your audience can understand.

B. Round numbers to a user-friendly number of digits. For example, “The average height of women is 65 inches”, not “65.357 inches”. Readers can’t absorb numbers if there are too many of them.

C. Don’t just talk about statistical significance. Give specific statistics that your reader can evaluate. For example if you want to highlight that you found a difference in height between men and women, don’t just tell your reader “There is a statistically significant difference between men and women”. Rather, say something like “Men average 68 inches in height; women average 65 inches. This difference is statistically significant.”

D. Style matters, both in written presentation and in the presentation of numbers. Be thoughtful, and be prepared to revise and re-think.