Coresignal, a leading provider of public web data for workplace and business research, today announced a collaboration with New York University (NYU) and Ohio State University sociologists. The research aims to examine how the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 affirmative action ruling is shaping hiring practices across industries.
The study by NYU professors Byungkyu Lee, Maria Abascal, and Tiffany Huang at the Ohio State University will analyze millions of job postings to identify how diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) messaging has shifted in job postings since the Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC.
While the ruling directly targeted race-conscious college admissions, researchers believe its effects extend across the broader labor market.
“Legal and social changes around affirmative action don’t just affect higher education; they are reshaping hiring practices across industries,” said Byungkyu Lee at NYU. “Workplace inclusion reflects what organizations value and prioritize. These signals shape career paths and access to opportunity. By examining how job postings change in response to political and legal shifts, we gain insight not only into the future of the workforce but also into how society itself is evolving.”
Coresignal’s dataset provides researchers with longitudinal job posting records. This allows the NYU team to apply causal inference methods, including difference-in-differences analysis, to compare hiring language before and after the decision in states with and without prior affirmative action bans.
“Our goal is to give researchers the tools to ask timely, high-impact questions about the labor market,” said Karolis Didziulis, Product Director at Coresignal. “By making public web data accessible to academic partners, we can shed light on how pivotal legal decisions shape opportunities, inclusion, and workforce composition.”
In addition to examining faculty postings, the study will expand to occupations across industries using a stratified sampling framework. The team will utilize large language models, fine-tuned on annotated datasets, to identify both explicit and implicit DEI language in job advertisements.
Findings are expected to provide valuable insights for policymakers, employers, and researchers tracking workplace equity.
About Coresignal
Coresignal is a leading provider of public AI-ready web data powering research and business insights with fresh, large-scale datasets on companies, jobs, and professionals. Founded in 2016, the company delivers over 3 billion regularly updated records and partners with universities and enterprises worldwide. Coresignal is a founding member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative (EWDCI).
