Pathways and Progress: Best Practices to Ensure Fair Compensation

What are the most common barriers to fair compensation, and what are the most effective ways that organizations can overcome them? This cutting-edge report on compensation practices outlines flexible approaches and proven solutions that work for businesses and nonprofits of all sizes. Learn how leading employers have used these approaches to improve their compensation practices and obtain tools that are applicable to any organization.More reports like this one are available on WE's website under Media Center > Publications > Making Workplaces Fairer

Dynamics of Gender Bias in Computing

Gender bias in computing is a hard problem that has resisted decades of research. One obstacle has been the absence of systematic data that might indicate when gender bias emerged in computing and how it has changed. This article presents a new dataset (N=50,000) focusing on formative years of computing as a profession (1950-1980) when U.S. government workforce statistics are thin or non-existent. This longitudinal dataset, based on archival records from six computer user groups (SHARE, USE, and others) and ACM conference attendees and membership rosters, revises commonly held conjectures that gender bias in computing emerged during professionalization of computer science in the 1960s or 1970s and that there was a 'linear' one-time onset of gender bias to the present. Such a linear view also lent support to the "pipeline" model of computing's "losing" women at successive career stages. Instead, this dataset reveals three distinct periods of gender bias in computing and so invites temporally distinct explanations for these changing dynamics. It significantly revises both scholarly assessment and popular understanding about gender bias in computing. It also draws attention to diversity within computing. One consequence of this research for CS reform efforts today is data-driven recognition that legacies of gender bias beginning in the mid-1980s (not in earlier decades) is the problem. A second consequence is correcting the public image of computer science: this research shows that gender bias is a contingent aspect of professional computing, not an intrinsic or permanent one.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

The Economic Ferocity of Policy

Each day, as the Dow Jones rises and falls, Congress similarly passes and fails legislation. These two seemingly continuous cycles intersect to the point that the two structures appear affixed. For centuries, this has posed an age-old question: is it policy that influences the economic system or is it the economic system itself that molds policy decision-making? Renowned economist Adam Smith is famous for his works detailing the autonomous nature of the economic system. Smith views policy as only a small roadblock in the master strategy of the economic flow of life. The Great Depression and the 2008 Recession, however, paint a vastly different picture of the relationship between policy and the economy. Policy, as observed at the local level through zoning, the state level through taxes, the federal level through spending programs, and the international level through trade policies, immediately and forcibly manipulates economic systems to the chagrin of the invisible hand. It is the actions of the political structure that set the scene for unprecedented economic gain or devastating recessional collapse

Ending Political Discrimination in the Workplace

Currently, a significant disparity exists in workplace legal protections for an employee’s political affiliation. On one hand, public sector (federal, state, or local government) employees enjoy a bevy of protections. For example, twenty million state and local government employees rely on the First Amendment (and 42 U.S.C. § 1983) to guard against workplace discrimination based on political affiliation. Over two million federal government civil service employees lean on the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CSRA) to provide that same protection

CYBERSECURITY: CREATING A CYBERSECURITY CULTURE

Human error has been identified as one of the highest contributing factors to successful cyber-attacks and security incidents that result in data leaks and theft of sensitive information. Human error has been caused by employees not behaving securely when interacting with information systems. This culminating experience project investigated how a cybersecurity culture can be developed to address the human error problem. The research was based on several key questions that focus on influencing factors of human behavior and best practices that have been used to develop a cybersecurity culture so that employees engage in secure behaviors. Social Cognitive Theory was used to guide research focusing on environmental and cognitive factors that influence human behavior and best practices for developing a cybersecurity culture were identified through recent case studies. Key findings include: 1) environmental factors such as social proximity, subjective norms, and descriptive norms, 2) cognitive factors such as self-efficacy, knowledge, and experience, and 3) several different best practices. Based on the results, this study provides recommendations to the US government for building a cybersecurity culture

Work Motivation Variances Influence on the Three Major Generations in Federal Student Aid

Public service motivation (PSM) is a characteristic that is exhibited through employees\u27 desire to serve in the interest of the communities they serve. In keeping up with the current times and technology advances in the workplace, federal agencies are continually introducing new and innovative ways to complete goals in these environments. Government agencies across the United States are repeatedly asking Commissioners and Secretaries to do more work with fewer workers. In addition to fewer public servants in government, the Baby Boomers looking to retire within the next ten years, and the transfer of knowledge to Generation X and Millennials needs to be fluid and consistent. The blueprint of working for a single employer for 30 years and retiring has changed. Loyalty is appreciated in the workplace; however, public servants of each generation have needs that have shown to be met differently. Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials as civil servants all have unique perspectives on what motivates them to work in the industry of government. The objective of this study was to apply a work extrinsic, intrinsic, motivational scale (WEIMS) survey to examine how the work motivations of Federal Student Aid employees are a contributing factor in how generational differences between public servants are wired to work in a bureaucratic environment. The U.S. Department of Education specifically, Federal Student Aid (FSA), is the organization that will be reviewed in how the identification of work motivations of each generation assist to achieve the organization\u27s goals

The Walking Dead: How the Criminal Regulation of Sodomy Survived Lawrence v. Texas

Eighteen years after the Supreme Court held in Lawrence v. Texas that a law criminalizing sodomy violated the constitutional guarantee to substantive due process, individuals are still arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated pursuant to statutes that are the material equivalent of the one at issue in Lawrence. Though this seems both strange and unfair, it is neither unusual nor accidental. Because the constitutional order renders the judiciary a passive institution and radically fragments authority across a polycentric collection of governments, noncompliance with judicial decisions is endemic to American institutional design

Regulating Impartiality in Agency Adjudication

Which should prevail—the Take Care Clause of Article II or the Due Process Clause? To Justice Breyer’s chagrin, the majorities in Lucia v. SEC and Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB expressly declined to resolve whether the U.S. Constitution condones SEC administrative law judges’ and other similarly situated agency adjudicators’ current statutory protection from at-will removal. The crux of the problem is that, on one hand, senior officials may use at-will removal to pressure agency adjudicators and thereby potentially imperil the impartiality that due process requires. On the other hand, Article II limits Congress’s ability to cocoon executive officers, including potentially agency adjudicators, from at-will removal. This Article argues that the executive branch itself can and should moot or mitigate this constitutional clash. Nothing in Article II prevents the president from issuing executive orders and agencies from promulgating regulations—collectively, what I refer to as “impartiality regulations”—that require good cause for disciplining and removing agency adjudicators, as well as other means of protecting adjudicator impartiality. Indeed, the executive branch has a long-standing yet overlooked practice of using executive orders and regulations for similar purposes. Impartiality regulations are but one form of the executive branch’s internal separation of powers. Such self-imposed separation provides a strong theoretical and practical solution for the agency-adjudicator dilemma

Regulating Impartiality in Agency Adjudication

Which should prevail—the Take Care Clause of Article II or the Due Process Clause? To Justice Breyer’s chagrin, the majorities in Lucia v. SEC and Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB expressly declined to resolve whether the U.S. Constitution condones SEC administrative law judges’ and other similarly situated agency adjudicators’ current statutory protection from at-will removal. The crux of the problem is that, on one hand, senior officials may use at-will removal to pressure agency adjudicators and thereby potentially imperil the impartiality that due process requires. On the other hand, Article II limits Congress’s ability to cocoon executive officers, including potentially agency adjudicators, from at-will removal. This Article argues that the executive branch itself can and should moot or mitigate this constitutional clash. Nothing in Article II prevents the president from issuing executive orders and agencies from promulgating regulations—collectively, what I refer to as “impartiality regulations”—that require good cause for disciplining and removing agency adjudicators, as well as other means of protecting adjudicator impartiality. Indeed, the executive branch has a long-standing yet overlooked practice of using executive orders and regulations for similar purposes. Impartiality regulations are but one form of the executive branch’s internal separation of powers. Such self-imposed separation provides a strong theoretical and practical solution for the agency-adjudicator dilemma