On Measuring the Diversity of Organizational Networks
This addresses the issue of under-representation and segregation of minority groups in organizational networks, offering a tool for evaluating hiring practices, though it is incremental as it builds on existing diversity and matching concepts.
The paper tackled the problem of assigning employment candidates to positions in social networks to maximize both diversity and fitness, proposing the Fair Employee Assignment (FairEA) algorithm, which demonstrated effectiveness in finding high-fitness, high-diversity matchings on real and synthetic networks.
The interaction patterns of employees in social and professional networks play an important role in the success of employees and organizations as a whole. However, in many fields there is a severe under-representation of minority groups; moreover, minority individuals may be segregated from the rest of the network or isolated from one another. While the problem of increasing the representation of minority groups in various fields has been well-studied, diver- sification in terms of numbers alone may not be sufficient: social relationships should also be considered. In this work, we consider the problem of assigning a set of employment candidates to positions in a social network so that diversity and overall fitness are maximized, and propose Fair Employee Assignment (FairEA), a novel algorithm for finding such a matching. The output from FairEA can be used as a benchmark by organizations wishing to evaluate their hiring and assignment practices. On real and synthetic networks, we demonstrate that FairEA does well at finding high-fitness, high-diversity matchings.