Implicit and Institutional bias in Faculty Hiring
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
3 likes•2,126 views
Why is faculty diversity important? What are some obstacles to achieving faculty diversity? What are some strategies and best practices for diversity in faculty hiring?
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Implicit and Institutional bias in Faculty Hiring
Similar to Implicit and Institutional bias in Faculty Hiring (20)
More from Tanya Golash Boza
More from Tanya Golash Boza (19)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Implicit and Institutional bias in Faculty Hiring
- 1. Future Faculty Hiring Initiative Tanya Golash-Boza Associate Professor of Sociology UC Merced @tanyaboza
- 2. Why is diversity at UC Merced important?
- 4. UC Diversity Statement Diversity is a defining feature of the University of California and we embrace it as a source of strength. Our differences — of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, socioeconomic status, abilities, experience and more — enhance our ability to achieve the university’s core missions of public service, teaching and research. We welcome faculty, staff and students from all backgrounds and want everyone at UC to feel respected and valued.
- 5. Diversity leads to more… • Creativity • Innovation • Problem-solving • Advances in knowledge
- 6. What are your goals? • What are some ways that diversity makes your program better or unique? • How do you think diversity could make a positive contribution to your department? • When it comes to diversity, what are your program’s goals?
- 9. Women faculty at UC Merced 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% Lecturers Asst Profs Assoc Profs Full Profs
- 10. UC Merced Fall 2015 Students Undergraduate Graduate African American 5% Asian 24% Hispanic 48% White 13% Other 10% African American 3% Asian 33% Hispanic 12% White 43% Other 9%
- 11. 0% 2% 4% 6% 8% 10% 12% 14% 16% 18% Professor Associate Assistant Lecturers Percentage of faculty who are under-represented minorities at UCM
- 12. Latino/a faculty at UC Merced? Latino/as at UC Merced • 11.7% of lecturers • 12.2% of Assistant Profs • 8.9% of Associate Profs • 8.9% of Full Profs – 48.5% of Undergraduate students at UC Merced are Latino/a UC Berkeley • 5.5% of faculty are Latino/a, compared to 17% of students.
- 13. Black Faculty at UC Merced? • 4 lecturers • 3 Assistant Professors • 2 Associate Professors • 0 Full Professors 373 teaching faculty
- 14. Does faculty diversity matter? • To UC Merced? • To your department? • To your students? • To you?
- 15. • Now, let’s discuss what prevents us from hiring faculty who are representative of our student body.
- 16. Implicit Bias • “We all like to think that we are objective scholars who judge people solely on their credentials and achievements, but copious research shows that every one of us has a lifetime of experience and cultural history that shapes the review process.” (Fine & Handelsman, 2006).
- 17. Are tall people more qualified? • In the U.S. population, about 14.5 % of men are six feet tall or more. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 %.
- 18. Are Emily and Brendan more employable than Lakisha and Jamal?
- 19. Are men more professional? • A study of over 300 recommendation letters for medical faculty hired by a large U.S. medical school found that letters for female applicants differed systematically from those for males. Letters written for women were shorter, raised more doubts, portrayed women as students and teachers while portraying men as researchers and professionals (Trix & Psneka, 2003).
- 20. Implicit bias • We all make judgments of others based on irrelevant criteria such as race, ethnicity, accent, gender, and sexual orientation – even when we try not to do this.
- 21. How does implicit bias work in the academy? • https://vimeo.com/160807787
- 22. How might implicit bias affect your hiring practices – screening, interviewing?
- 23. Institutional bias • In 1978 Barbara Christian becomes the first Black woman to be granted tenure at the University of California, Berkeley. • Berkeley was founded in 1868 2% of all full professors at very-high-activity research universities are black.
- 24. This is not (just) a crisis of supply • There was a 43% increase in the number of black PhDs between 2000 and 2010, yet only a 1.3% increase in black faculty appointments at traditionally white institutions during that time. • UC System: In 1995, 9.9% of hires were under- represented minorities. In 2004, 9.4% of hires were. In 2013, this declined to 9.0%.
- 25. If we do nothing, UC Merced faculty will become LESS diverse • A study of 689 searches at 3 large elite public universities revealed that 47% of under- represented faculty hires & 86% of hires of blacks had one of these features: – Job focused on diversity (i.e. AfAm Lit) – Target of opportunity – Racially diverse search committee • Of these 689 Searches, the 511 that paid no attention to diversity only led to 3 hires of African Americans and 0 hires of Native Americans.
- 26. What does work? • Appoint a search committee that represents a diverse cross section of the faculty • Broaden your search pools: Most fields have listservs, groups, and other resources that can help you identify or reach qualified underrepresented candidates • Agree on evaluation criteria prior to reviewing candidate • UC Merced is developing a Faculty Equity Advisor program, and FEAs help you conduct your searches
- 27. What are we going to do about this? • Faculty Equity Advisors – Help constitute Search Committees – Explain best practices to Search Committees – Advise on broader PhD pool availability – Help evaluate Contribution to Diversity Statements – Ensure that candidate pools match broader PhD pool
- 28. What are we going to do about this? • Administrative support – Additional funds to advertise in spaces where we are likely to find candidates who can make contributions to diversity. – Additional funds to bring candidates to campus if the short list is diverse. – Target of excellence hiring initiatives. • UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
- 29. What are your ideas for moving forward?
Editor's Notes
- Today, we will talk about why diversity is important at UC Merced
- The UC Is a public institution Public Institutions should serve the state’s population
- Diversity is important to the UC
- http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/ Diversity of expertise confers benefits that are obvious—the university needs people with expertise in curriculum development, student learning, securing external funding, and building operations to run effectively. It is clear that the university can’t run effectively without a diversity of expertise. What about diversity in terms of gender, race, and sexual identity? Just as a physicist and an engineer bring different expertise to the table, so do people of different backgrounds. Men and women, blacks and whites, queers and straight people bring their unique experiences and perspectives to the table. A male and a female engineer might have perspectives as different from one another as an engineer and a physicist—and that is a good thing. Both the presence of different perspectives as well as our reaction to them lead to creativity and innovation. When we interact with people we perceive as different from ourselves, we often believe we have to work harder to communicate our ideas and perspectives to them. This effort leads to more creativity and innovation. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/ A recent study examined the ethnic identity of the authors of 2.5 million papers in 11 scientific fields written between 1985 and 2009. This study found that papers authored by diverse groups received more citations and had higher impact factors than papers written by people from the same ethnic group. For example, papers with authors who had Chinese as well as English surnames had higher citation counts than papers where all of the authors were Chinese. http://www.nature.com/news/collaboration-strength-in-diversity-1.15912#/ref-link-1 It is difficult to be sure of the exact mechanisms that make diverse groups more creative and innovative, but we certainly can be sure that it happens. If your unit isn’t doing what it could to cultivate diversity, you are losing out on excellence.
- Is there anything that keeps you from meeting your goals? (Talk about this with the people next to you for about five minutes)
- In some fields, gender representation is less of an issue.
- In other fields, the disparities are starker.
- How is UC Merced doing in terms of diversity? It depends how we measure it. Lecturers: 49% Women Assistant Professors: 43% Women Associate Professors: 39% Women Full Professors: 27% Women Background info on gender across time.
- Now, let’s talk about diversity in terms of racial and ethnic identity. Again, we can perceive pipeline issues.
- Overall, 14% of our faculty are URMs Professor 8.89% Associate 14.93% Assistant 15.56% Lecturers 14.62% Here, we can see that we could do better in hiring as well as in promotion to Full
- 2.4% of our faculty are African American
- Studies show that it is important for students to have teachers who share their background. One example comes from K-12 education. There is a disparity in the number of black children recommended for gifted programs and this is because nonblack teachers are less likely to recommend black students for the gifted program, even when the students’ test scores are high. Whereas nonblack teachers identify black students as gifted in reading 2.1 percent of the time, black teachers identify black students as gifted in reading: 6.2 percent of the time. http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/01/20/463190789/to-be-young-gifted-and-black-it-helps-to-have-a-black-teacher
- Implicit biases are attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. We are biased, even when we don’t want to be. Even people who study implicit bias are biased. It can be hard to understand or believe that each of us has biases whether we want to have them or not. A group of researchers crafted a fictitious legal research memo and asked 60 law firm partners to evaluate the memo. The memo contained deliberate errors. The partners all received the same memo. However, half were told the author was black and the other half were told the author was white. The partners were asked to conduct a “writing analysis” of the memo. Evaluators who were told that the author was black found more of the embedded errors and rated the memo as lower quality compared to those partners who were told the author was white. The author of the study explains: “we see more errors when we expect to see errors, and we see fewer errors when we do not expect to see errors” (Reeves, 2014, p. 6). Another audit study involved the hiring of an assistant professor. Although the CVs were substantively identical, both male and female professors rated the male applicant superior (two to one) over the female applicant. (Steinpreis, Anders, and Ritzke 1999)
- Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature. http://gladwell.com/blink/why-do-we-love-tall-men/
- Researchers sent out identical resumes for entry-level jobs. The only variation on the CVs was the name. Applicants with white-sounding names were 50% more likely to get called for an initial interview than applicants with black-sounding names. Applicants with white names need to send about 10 resumes to get one callback. Applicants with black names need to send about 15 resumes to achieve the same result. Randomly assigning different names to resumes showed that job applicants with “white-sounding names” were more likely to be interviewed for open positions than were equally qualified applicants with “African American –sounding names.” (Bertrand & Mullainathan, 2004) https://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.html
- http://diversity.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/exploring-the-color-of-glass.pdf
- Pride and Prejudice: Employment Discrimination against Openly Gay Men in the United States https://workinprogress.oowsection.org/2012/02/10/pride-and-prejudice-revisited-an-interview-with-andras-tilcsik/ This article presents the first large-scale audit study of discrimination against openly gay men in the United States. Pairs of fictitious re´sume´s were sent in response to 1,769 job postings in seven states. One re´sume´ in each pair was randomly assigned experience in a gay campus organization, and the other re´sume´ was assigned a control organization. Two main findings have emerged. First, in some but not all states, there was significant discrimination against the fictitious applicants who appeared to be gay. This geographic variation in the level of discrimination appears to reflect regional differences in attitudes and antidiscrimination laws. Second, employers who emphasized the importance of stereotypically male heterosexual traits were particularly likely to discriminate against openly gay men.
- 29 minute one here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7W1Xn3o1n_zWk1RUUczaHhqNnM/view Scene 3: Diversity Issues (Starts at 49:32. Ends at 51:37) 3 min Password for vimeo: UCTVUCOP - What are your thoughts after seeing that video? The video is about the review process, but some issues may come through in hiring discussions.
- There is a history of institutional inequality in the university system. There are also present-day patterns that reproduce that inequality. 3% of full professors at high-activity research universities are black
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/01/29/the-academy-awards-isnt-alone-with-its-color-problem-look-at-higher-education/ At UC Merced, 14% of our ladder-rank faculty are under-represented minorities. Source on UC: http://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-programs/_files/faculty-diversity-task-force/report.pdf
- http://facultyhiring.uoregon.edu/files/2011/05/Interrupting-the-usual-Successful-strategies-for-hiring-diverse-faculty-2kiokaj.pdf Special hires: (1) The job description used to recruit faculty members explicitly engages diversity at the department or subfield level: (2) An institutional "special hire" strategy, such as waiver of a search, target of opportunity hire, or spousal hire, is used; (3) The search is conducted by an ethnically/racially diverse search committee. We ignore diversity at our own peril. We are likely to miss highly qualified candidates from under-represented groups if we let implicit bias impede our decision making.