Report 2015-132 Recommendation 13 Responses

Report 2015-132: County Pay Practices: Although the Counties We Visited Have Rules in Place to Ensure Fairness, Data Show That a Gender Wage Gap Still Exists (Release Date: May 2016)

Recommendation #13 To: Santa Clara County

To ensure that they can readily monitor gender-based pay equity complaints and reliably evaluate how often such complaints are filed by its employees, each county should develop tracking mechanisms that allow management to reliably determine how often these complaints occur and whether there are patterns of complaints that pertain to specific county departments or classifications.

6-Month Agency Response

The County of Santa Clara Equal Opportunity Department has developed and implemented (as of August 2016) a relational database that tracks gender complaints and specific harms such as compensation, denied promotion, differential treatment and disparate impact, which allows each Equal Opportunity Officer to identify the specific type of gender complaint. A screen shot of the database was forwarded to Ralph Flynn. In addition the database tracks by Department or Classifications to help identify any patterns.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Fully Implemented

We reviewed the information provided by Santa Clara and believe the system developed by the county adequately addresses our recommendation.

60-Day Agency Response

The County of Santa Clara Equal Opportunity Division is currently developing a relational database that will track gender complaints and specific harms such as compensation, denied promotion, differential treatment and disparate impact, which will allow each Equal Opportunity Officer to identify the specific type of gender complaint. A screen shot of the database will be forwarded.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: Pending

All Recommendations in 2015-132

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.