Measuring social progress requires the right metric. The broadening and narrowing of wage gaps, that women and Black men earn 87 cents to every dollar a white man earns, for example, are often cited in discussions about the persistence of employer discrimination in the workforce.  Wage gaps are calculations currently based only on average wages, and it’s a metric University of Toronto Researcher Rahul Deb and his co-authors have found makes discrimination too easy to dismiss. Instead, Deb et al propose, calculations should be based on a model that considers the entire wage distribution – instead of just the average or mean — to better isolate the effects of discrimination on compensation of diverse groups of people. [Read more…]