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?
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.
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?
7.
8.
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%
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
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
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.