Growing sensitivity to societal inequality has led many to ask if their organizations create disparities in opportunity or outcomes for employees, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. Rider’s course provides students with the analytical skills to identify and to address such disparities.

The core of the course is a novel “equity analytics” framework, which is based on extensive social science research and methods. Organizations use processes to allocate opportunities such as jobs or projects to people, and organizations value people’s contributions through such methods as performance evaluations.

Disparities can result either from organizations treating people differently or from treating people equivalently but with differing outcomes. Equity analytics entails attributing observed disparities to one or more of the cells in a 2×2 matrix defined by the intersection of organizational processes with the two forms of treatment.

This innovative framework helps organizational leaders achieve three objectives. First, data and analysis helps leaders frame productive dialogue among people with diverse notions of fairness. Second, people can find common ground in one or some of the four cells even if their definitions of equity differ. Third, identifying specific disparity-generating processes informs the matching of effective solutions to specific problems.

Using real-world data and custom cases situated in various contexts — such as Airbnb, Hollywood, the NFL or organizational pay records — students learn to analyze inequity in organizations, markets and industries; infer plausible determinants of such inequities; and design interventions to reduce documented inequities.

Above photo:

Chris Rider, Thomas C. Kinnear Professor and associate professor of entrepreneurial studies, Stephen M. Ross School of Business