Measure Upstream Discrimination

When we try to measure gaps in outcomes between groups, we often turn to an approach called a Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition. I’m all for identifying discriminatory gaps, but we need to be careful that we don’t discount certain kinds of discrimination from our data calculations just because it isn’t our discrimination.

Ok, so what is the Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition? There are many, many free resources explaining this in great detail, with mathematical formulas and examples of it being applied across subject matter and sectors. If you want to get a real handle on this, definitely seek them out. For our purposes, we’re going to use a very simplistic and commonly used example: looking at differences between wages and workers.

HOLD UP:

I’ve been calling this the “Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition” because that’s how I learned about it in school, and that’s a useful way to look it up online, but really, we should be calling it the Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition.

Nearly twenty years before Alan Blinder and Ronald Oaxaca wrote their respective papers on the subject (1973) an incredible sociologist and demographer named Evelyn M. Kitagawa developed the method in a 1955 published piece titled: “Components of a Difference Between Two Rates”. Neither Blinder nor Oaxaca cited her work in their papers. Look her up…