Exploring the Gender Pay Gap

Members: Theo Covich & Trinity Martinez

Inspiration

As students who identify in an ethnic minority category, we thought that it would be interesting to investigate the gender pay gap and its implications in the workforce. Our main motivation for this project was to promote and bring attention to the notion of "equal pay for equal work" regardless of any demographic or racial differences.

What it does

Our project contains a set of data visualizations which answer our research questions, as well as 2 machine learning models that use a set of variables to predict mean error of predicted income to actual income per individual.

How we built it

We used the Altair data visualizations library to create our plots, and we used SciKit Learn's two models: DecisionTreeRegressor and RandomForestGenerator.

Challenges we ran into

Learning a new Python library was definitely a challenge, but we overcame this challenge by reading the library documentation thoroughly and looking at example plots. Our machine learning model also ran into some troubles because initially we wanted to use clustering, but then reverted to using a simpler regression model that we felt would better represent our model.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of investigating a topic that has such a personal connotation to us. The social implications of this topic are something we feel is important to bring awareness to. Additionally we are proud of learning a new library, setting up a machine learning model, using new data science techniques, and setting up our own data science environment on our machines.

What we learned

We learned how to work as a team which is important because in the industry, you are alway working with a team. We also learned valuable time management skills, communication skills, and leadership skills, as well as technical skills such as coding, using a new library, and setting up a new data science environment.

What's next for Exploring the Gender Pay Gap

We hope that people find our project informative and use this information in their own respective industries. It is also one of our hopes that people who hold leadership positions or have positions of power can use information to potentially create policies to close or shorten the gender pay gap, bringing more equity to the workforce.

Built With

• python