JUST Capital and The Data Incubator Challenge

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re teaming up with JUST Capital to help crowd-source data science for social good.  The Data Incubator offers a free eight-week data science fellowship for those with a PhD or a masters degree looking to transition into data science.  As a part of the application process, students are asked to submit a data science capstone project and the best students are invited to work on them during the fellowship.  JUST Capital is helping providing data and project prompts to harness the collective brainpower amongst The Data Incubator fellows to solve these high-impact social problems.

• These projects focus on applied data science techniques with tangible impacts on JUST Capital’s mission.
• The projects are open ended and creativity is encouraged. The documents provided, below, are suitable for analysis, but one should not shy in seeking out additional sources of data.

JUST Capital is a nonprofit that provides information and rankings on how large corporations perform on issues that matter most to the public. We give individuals a voice on what really matters to them, and evaluate how companies perform on those issues. By providing the right knowledge and making it easy to access and understand, we believe capital will flow to corporations that are more JUST, ultimately leading to a balanced business world that takes into account human needs that are so often neglected today. The meaning of JUST is defined by the American public as fair, equitable and balanced. In 2016, JUST Capital surveyed nearly 4,000 Americans from all regions and walks of life, in its second annual Poll on Corporate America. The issues identified by the public form the basis of our benchmark — it is against these Drivers and Components that we measure corporate performance. The most important factors broadly relate to employees, customers, company leadership, the environment, communities and investors.

JUST Capital has assessed and ranked 897 of the largest publicly-traded companies in America. These companies are the majority of the constituents in the Russell 1000 Index, which represents about 92% of the U.S. stock market value. We’ve excluded only those that we can’t subject to a common standard of measurement, such as most REITs, companies that do not file form 10K with the SEC, or investment holding companies. The number of ranked companies may change due to corporate activities such as mergers and acquisitions. We may also exclude companies from the rankings due to data limitations, such as having a relatively small US employee headcount. Additionally, for the inaugural release of company rankings, scores and rank for the bottom 50% of companies are strictly confidential. In late 2017, JUST Capital will release a full head-to-head rank of the largest publicly-traded companies in America.

Background Documents

• Metric Legend: metric_table.xlsx. This document provides an overview of the ranking mode performance indicators or metrics. Metric codes, used in subsequent projects, as well as metric definitions, can be found within this document. Metric codes are somewhat self-explanatory (e.g., PAY.LIVING refers to a score per company on the percent of employees making a living wage in the county in which they work; JOBS.US refers to a score on job creation in the United States).
• JUST Capital Methodology. The JUST Capital Methodology is a comprehensive view of the JUST Capital ranking and scoring framework. The methodology dives into particular detail in Section 4.2. In summary, companies are compared only against industry peers (this will change in 2017). A Z-Score was used, with 50 as the mean and 25 as one standard deviation.
• For files that require a password, please use: tdi

You can apply to The Data Incubator fellowship here: https://www.thedataincubator.com/programs/data-science-fellowship/#apply