CyChecks3

FOIA anyone?

Iowa State University recently conducted an internal review of salaries and possible discrepencies based on race and/or gender. The public is not being offered access to the data nor the analyses, but rather a scant summary. While the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) probably covers this information, requesting data is not super easy.

Use what we’ve got

Publicly available data

The goal of CyChecks3 is to complement their findings using publicly available data. Iowa state employee salaries are available at this site. You can access the data with or without an API token, but can sign up for one here.

This data only reports genders, and only does so in a binary fashion. We therefore cannot analyze the data with respect to race.

Less publicly available data

Salaries are department specific, and without accounting for these effects comparisons of salaries by gender could be misleading. We received department affiliations from Human Resources, but this data is, strangely, not public. Additionally, matching salary data names to affiliation data names was troublesome on several accounts, and required a fair amount of googling and hand edits. We have done what we think is the best job we can for 2019 data.

What you get

This package contains:

1. Raw salary data (salaries)
2. Raw affiliation data (affiliations)
3. An internally-created dataset with only tenure-track faculty data from 2019 (professors)

Installation

You can install the developmental version CyChecks3 from github with:

devtools::install_github("vanichols/CyChecks3")

Examples

Shiny coming soon!