Recent Sony Hack, Diversity Problems and the Gender Pay Gap at Deloitte

The Recent Sony Hack Reveals Huge Diversity Problems and Gender Pay Gap Among Top-Level Executives in the film industry. This data, though unlawfully disclosed to the public, might shed lights on some of the causes behind the huge gender gap in the film industry. Earlier this year, we’ve -lawfully and publicly- measured the gender gap using Open Data published by The Internet Movie Database (IMDB). We’ve genderized over 5 million names to produce this chart:

The public may wonder also on How Did 30,000 Deloitte Employees Get Caught Up in Sony’s Data Leak? As many audit and consulting companies, Deloitte communicates periodically on its inclusiveness to women in the workplace, participates to women empowerment initiatives, even offers consulting services on gender diversity and corporate governance. Behind doors the gender pay gap at Deloitte could very well look like this one, produced from actual data of a different large consulting firm:

We live in a age of transparency, where companies are encouraged to disclose more and more data on their Gender Diversity and inclusiveness to a more Diverse Workforce. Though this particular case of the Sony data leak was originally caused by unlawful criminal activity, unwilling disclosures of payroll data could also be the result of negligence. Today, all women and men can make use of online services to ‘genderize‘ a HR database, or to recognize if a company has a bias towards employees or a certain origin. Employees, trade unions, journalists or feminist activists might have got hold of the Pastebin data (now removed) and may disclose the real picture of gender equality at Deloitte – making good use of our free gender gap API …

Companies should take such event as a forewarning to take the matter of gender and cultural diversity seriously.

Consulting companies and auditors in particular should be aware of the absolute necessity to close the gap between how they communicate about gender equality and how they behave in the workplace. They should be the first users and promoters of Open Data as well as of benchmarking the Gender Gap in their sector of activity.

Recently, we had an informative exchange of tweets about how the Australian Government communicates on gender equality. See how transparent a government can be on Gender Equality, making good use of Open Data and technology.

THAT's #opendata! Australian Gov Directory: structure, organisations and key people via @sherro58 @AllanBarger #gov2au cc @PottingerIndex

— NamSor Gender API (@gendreapp) November 27, 2014

Not only the Australian Government publishes an Open Dataset under the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012

https://data.gov.au/dataset/wgea-dataset

but also it publishes the raw data at the finest grain level

http://data.gov.au/dataset/directory-gov-au-full-data-export

making it possible for citizens to see data from other angles (looking at different segmentation, analyzing biases towards employees or a certain origin, etc.)

Earlier this year, we have launched Gender Gap Grader – a global initiative to measure the gender gap across all professional fields, using Open Data and a public API.