Meet Our Compensation Team: Dan Kuang

Introducing
Dan Kuang, Ph.D.
Director,
Resolution Economics

What’s your background?

Looking back, I’ve been running adverse impact –related analytics since 1998. That’s natural since I specialized in applied statistics and workplace assessment (e.g., testing, performance) in my graduate studies. At that time, there weren’t many of us with this skillset, so I got to work on a lot of really impactful stuff, e.g., biostatistics for Kaiser, SAT validation for ETS, Title VII federal class action litigation.  

Why did you take on pay equity as your specialty?

My first pay equity study dates back to when EEOC published their Compensation Compliance Manual. That policy move drew a lot of attention from employers who were eager to understand their pay equity situation. I was crushed with projects work. As a poor psychology graduate student, the money was great, but experiencing the social justice impact of the work was a spiritual moment—I’d found my calling in life. To this day, I still humble myself as a servant to the people who entrust their well-being to my analytics—it remains an incredible privilege.  

What’s one thing people should know about pay equity or other employment decisions – but don’t?

Most people think of pay equity as a money and numbers issue, and so they’re over-focused on technology and software. That’s wrong. They will never achieve pay equity throwing money into a system that consistently creates pay inequalities. My practice is to focus on the why and when clients fix the underlying problems, they’re pleasantly surprised to see how robust their pay equity is—often not requiring a pay equity study every year. The fact that people think it’s cool to use technology and software to run daily or hourly pay equity analyses, fails to the miss the point—those daily or hourly pay equity hotspots they find are either transient or due to operational defects. Ignoring the legal exposure they may be creating; they’re simply not fixing the problem.