README.md

In vanichols/CyChecks: Obtains and Analyzes Iowa State University Salary Data

CyChecks

Overview

The goal of CyChecks is to allow users easy access to the publicly available Iowa State University (the Cyclones) employee salary data.

Some of the services this access could offer include:

1. Aid job seekers in negotiating starting salaries.
2. Shed light on possible pay inequities with respect to gender.
3. Identify positions that are lacking gender diversity.

Background

In 2008 PhDComics produced an interesting figure summarising US academic institution salaries:

One might wonder - are Iowa State University (ISU) salaries consistent with this national data? Using the CyChecks package one can find out!

The state of Iowa offers a large amount of public data at this site. You can access the data with or without an API token, but can sign up for one here. Iowa state employee salaries are available at this site. CyChecks provides a function to easily scrape this data for any given year.

The data from this site does not include the employee's home department. Unfortunately, to our knowledge the data linking names to departments is not easily accessible. ISU's Human Resources Department kindly provided a list of employees with their home departments and associated colleges valid as of January 1 2019. Since acquiring this information is not reproducible to the average user, we've included a full dataset (with names anonymized) of all salary info (2007 - 2018) cross-referenced by department in the CyChecks package. We realize employees that have left before 2019 will not have their department listed in this dataset. This isn't ideal, and we hope ISU will provide public access to department affiliations in the future.

Summary

This package currently includes:

1. A function to:
   1. download data directly from the iowa.gov website
   2. anonymize names of downloaded data
   3. simplify professor position titles
   4. quickly identify departments with possible gender pay inequities
   5. Launch a Shiny App to help you explore the dataset provided in our package.
2. Data from:
   1. Employee/salary/department dataset for 2007-2018
   2. Employee/salary/department/college dataset assumed to be valid for 2018
3. A shiny app for visualizing data

Installation

You can install the developmental version CyChecks from github with:

devtools::install_github("https://github.com/vanichols/CyChecks")

Examples

You can access the data using our sal_df function.

x <- sal_df(limit = 10, fiscal_year = 2015)

You can visualize the dataset provided with the package (sals_dept) using our Shiny App, which can be launched using our runShiny() function.

runShiny()

With our package, we were able to partially recreate the PhDComics figure for the Cyclones in 2018. You can see that our data is not consistent with national averages: our football coach gets paid four times as much as the President, not twice as much.

vanichols/CyChecks documentation built on June 23, 2019, 11:38 p.m.