There are increasing calls for the policies regulating academic communities, like those aimed at promoting equity and inclusion, to be based on evidence. There are both conceptual and practical questions to be addressed in response to these calls. What types of evidence should we gather? How do we combine multiple types of evidence into a single policy recommendation? And so on. This talk will discuss how simple mathematical models can help us incorporate various kinds of evidence relevant to equity and inclusion into the evidence base for our policies. Rubin will discuss, as examples, models from my own previous work on citation practices, collaborations, and other facets of academic communities.