You are a Senior HR Analyst who works within a People Analytics team for a large Silicon Valley technology company. The company specialises in artificial intelligence, and it is a major provider of online services for everyday people as well as business clients. Its success depends on technological innovation and the ability to stay head of its competitors. The company is very concerned about the issue of pay equity among its workforce. Preliminary analysis of payroll data has revealed a large gap between male and female software engineers. This gap partly occurs for seemingly legitimate reasons - for instance, female employees are more likely to work part-time, and male employees are overented at senior levels of the organisation. However, the organisation is concerned that at least some of the gap may be due to biased decision-making in pay negotiations, and that if any inequity becomes public knowledge, they could be faced with a large class-action lawsuit. Thus, the organisation wants you to investigate whether the pay gap is due to bias, or whether it can be accounted for by other factors. The Director of People and Culture wants you to investigate this situation. She wants you to explain why some employees are paid more than others and to identify whether there are any pay discrepancies that cannot be explained by other factors. Specifically, she wants you to draw on the pillars of evidence based management to: (1) identify the factors that influence employee compensation, (2) recommend a course of action for addressing any systematic pay discrepancies between male and female employees. Task Produce a report for the HR Director outlining your conclusions from your investigation. This report should consist of three main parts: Part A. Introduction and Method In the first part of the report, you should briefly provide some contextual information about the organisation. You should also provide the details of your approach for obtaining and analysing information from each of the four sources of evidence associated with Evidence-Based Management. B1. Evidence from "Stakeholders" For this part of the assignment, you should first interview someone you know who has been involved in a pay negotiation. Please refer to this page for more details on how to conduct the interview. The interview should be posted to the Discussion Forum by the end of week 6 . In this section of the assignment, you should summarise the major themes that have emerged across the interviews posted on the Forum (not just your own interviewee). You are required to undertake your own interview, which will be assessed as part of the "Analysis of Interview" criterion. B2. Evidence from the Academic Literature In this section, you should conduct a brief review of the academic literature on pay equity. It is strongly recommended that you focus on obtaining systematic reviews and meta-analyses, as opposed to individual studies. B3. Evidence from Experts In this section, you should outline some opinions from experts about pay equity. To obtain these opinions, you could look to some articles published in non-academic business publications, such as Harvard Business Review. Alternatively, you could interview a recognised expert compensation and report what they said (this is not expected). B4. Organisational Data The organisation has detailed payroll information in its HRIS, but there are likely to be other factors that influence compensation (e.g., whether an employee works part-time, or has taken a career break). In your report, you should include a section about what metrics the organisation should be collecting based on your research. These can either be objective HRM metrics (e.g., leaves of absence) or subjective ratings (e.g., perceived fairness of remuneration). You do not have to analyse any data for this part of the report; you should identify metrics you believe would be useful and provide a justification. Part C. Recommendations In the final part of the report, you should present a set of recommendations to be implemented. The recommendations should be based on your findings in Part B. You may wish to use a prioritisation tool (e.g., an Ease/Benefits matrix) in order to identify the top priorities for the organisation versus longer-term interventions. These recommendations should be followed with a short conclusion. Other Information - The total report should be approximately 2500 words, not including references, tables or figures. While there are no stipulations as to how long each section should be, Parts B and C are likely to take up the most space in the report. - This assignment should be formatted as a report (i.e., with headings), but there is no need for an Executive Summary. - You may present additional information in appendices if you exceed the 2500 word total. In the body of the text, you should focus more on providing a summary and interpretation of the evidence you obtained. - For your References section, you should present your academic references and non-academic references under different headings. (You could use the headings: "Academic References" and "Non-Academic References".) The Australian Business Dean's Council provides a list of journals B considered to be academic. - The assignment must be uploaded as a Word document (not PDF). You should work on the same Word document for the entire assignment; do not copy and paste your work into a new Word document after you have finished your writing (i.e., the total editing time and authorship metadata for the document should remain intact). - I have set up a Frequently Asked Questions section in the Discussion Forum, based on common questions from last year. Please check it out and feel free to submit your own questions