Common Myths About Diversity and Equity in Faculty Recruitment & Hiring


We embrace diversity in all its forms and we strive for an inclusive community that fosters an open, enlightened and productive environment.

Addressing Common Myths About Diversity and Equity in Faculty Recruitment and Hiring

Compiled by the Advancing Faculty Diversity Workgroup, 2020-2021, UC Santa Cruz

Efforts to pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of California on the grounds of social justice and true excellence in the production of knowledge, are essential to fulfill the primary mission of public university. Yet, these efforts have continued to be stymied in recent decades. The common myths discussed here are often shared by high level management, faculty and staff, i.e. you and me, and many of our colleagues. If these myths were less common or ubiquitous, perhaps the University of California’s efforts to diversify the academy for greater equity and inclusion might result in more improved outcomes.

To understand what is at stake and what this truly means for us in the university, please read the following commonsensical myths and reactions to equity and excellence-oriented initiatives, as they are contrasted with substantial social science data showing how and why they are flawed, and why they are just unexamined biases — biases whose power resides in their unquestioned obviousness and our willingness to uncritically accept and repeat them.

By reading this webpage, you have already made a good start at better understanding equity issues at the University of California. You can find more resources in five bibliographies put together by UC Santa Cruz’s Advancing Faculty Diversity Workgroup of 2020-2021. Each paper in these bibliographies was identified and collated by your colleagues during the 2020-2021 year. The bibliographies cover (1) Top Twelve Articles, (2) Recruitment, (3) Hiring Processes, (4) Service Contributions, and (5) Retention.

1. “There is no evidence of racism or sexism in my field or in the academy.”

There is overwhelming evidence that racism affects many aspects of academia and of the workforce. For example, 62% of Black and 42% of Hispanic employees in STEM have experienced discrimination in recruitment, retention and promotion (Pew Research Center, 2018). In addition, racism occurs in the form of microaggressions, which are commonplace, often unintentional slights, slurs and insults about people of color (Sue et al., 2007). There is also structural racism — policies and practices that result in the exclusion of minoritized groups and women on the one hand, and the promotion of majority groups on the other. One example is defining “merit” based on metrics that favor majority groups (Hofstra et al., 2020; Heffernan, 2021). Also common is bias in evaluation and assessment, for example, in teaching evaluations, as well as a host of other biases that affect the recruitment, hiring, and promotion and progress of faculty of color. Solutions include improving university climate and sense of belonging for people of all identities, and, during hiring and promotion, emphasizing innovation, creativity, and meeting desired teaching and mentoring outcomes over traditional metrics. To better understand the effect of racism and sexism on the experiences of women faculty of color, check out Presumed Incompetent I: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia, & Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia, by Yolanda Flores Niemann and colleagues.

References:

Flores Niemann, Yolanda et al. (2012). Presumed Incompetent I: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia. Utah State University Press.

Flores Niemann, Yolanda et al. Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia. (2020). Utah State University Press.

Heffernan, Troy. “Sexism, racism, prejudice, and bias: a literature review and synthesis of research surrounding student evaluations of courses and teaching.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (2021): 1-11.

Hofstra, Bas, et al. “The diversity–innovation paradox in science.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117.17 (2020): 9284-9291.

Pew Research Center, January 2018. “Women and Men in STEM often at odds over workplace equity

Sue, Derald Wing, et al. “Racial microaggressions in everyday life: implications for clinical practice.” American psychologist 62.4 (2007): 271.


2. “Don’t politicized my field! Stick to the academic topic, not social issues!”

All disciplines are influenced by individual implicit biases and beliefs, which are brought into academic work spaces. A large body of research provides evidence that human cognition relies on processes that introduce implicit or unconscious assumptions that influence judgment and decision-making, which impact all aspects of academia (UC Davis, STEAD Workshop). For this reason, it is important to think about how to raise awareness and to employ policies and practices that minimize the impact of implicit bias. In addition, one goal of social justice activism in academia seeks to identify how systemic racism and implicit bias influence the topics we pursue, the research methods we use, the outlets in which we publish, and the outcomes we observe. For example, machine learning models are frequently built using racially biased datasets (Schatsky et al., 2019). This has led to widely-used algorithms (including for facial recognition or criminal recidivism) that are less accurate for BIPOC, perpetuating systemic racism in the criminal justice system (Grother et al., 2019; Larson et al., 2016; Public letter,2020).

References:

Grother, P., Ngan, M., & Hanaoka, K. (2019). Face Recognition Vendor Test (FVRT): Part 3, Demographic Effects. (National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2019).

Larson, J. et al. (2016, May 23). How we analyzed the COMPAS recidivism algorithm. ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism…

Coalition for Critical Technology. (2020, June 22). Public letter. Abolish the #TechToPrisonPipeline: Crime prediction technology reproduces injustices and causes real harm. Medium.com. https://medium.com/@CoalitionForCriticalTechnology

Schatsky, David et al. (2019, April 17). Can AI be ethical? Deloitte. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/signals-for-strategists/ethical-artificial-intelligence.html intelligence.html

Samantha and Drake Baer, “20 cognitive biases that screw up your decisions.” (2015) https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/trust_account…


3. “I’m not racist, sexist, ableist, or other “ist” — so I don’t need to do anything differently.”

Statements like these imply that individuals who do not see themselves as explicitly “racist,” that is, they tend to reject the idea that racial groups are stratified by superior and inferior characteristics and traits, and they do not engage in explicitly racist acts, do not act in ways that are racist. They might believe that people who perceive race-based problems or concerns tend to be “oversensitive” or see problems that aren’t there, or that if those problems truly exist, someone else has the responsibility to fix them.

Yet, racial discrimination comes in many forms, and comprises both individual and institutional aspects. For example, denial of racism or of being “racist” can be a form of racial gaslighting. Critical race scholar Shannon Sullivan argues that middle-class whites buttress their sense of moral goodness by defining themselves as “good White people” (Sullivan, 2014), compared against more obviously racist “bad apples,” who are often stereotyped as working-class, rural, or politically conservative Whites. This logic denigrates Whites from lower class backgrounds who are deemed, by their liberal middle-class counterparts, to be exclusively responsible for ongoing White racism. The emphasis placed on colorblindness and “White middle-class goodness” cultivates a culture of silence, denial, and passivity around issues of race and power and, ultimately, carries on attitudes of White guilt, shame, and betrayal. Attitudes that distance people from confronting racial bias are also part of a racial history that is routinely downplayed, erased, and misrepresented in our education system, the media, and national mythmaking (Loewen, 2008). Racism is not simply an interpersonal dynamic. Attitudes about racial superiority are routine practices and ideas embedded in our institutions, including our laws and policies, families, education system, media, film, and television (mass incarceration, housing discrimination, redlining, policing, unequal schooling, poverty, etc.). Ibram X. Kendi shows that systemic White supremacy runs deep in both the political right and left in his book, Stamped from the Beginning (Kendi, 2016).

Many academics also need to bring anti-bias (anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-ableism, and others) into their experimental design. A long-standing insight of social science suggests that culture and environment play a significant role in how individuals perceive themselves and their environments (Wang, 2016). However, the widely held belief that human behavior, perception, and memory are innate and should not differ across cultural groups can discourage scientists from collecting or considering data about culture and ethnicity as part of their research design.  This often leads to non-representative studies that generalize the Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic experience to people from all cultures and ethnicities (Wang, 2016). Researchers across all fields have in this regard a key opportunity to exercise being inclusive and antibiased by designing representative and robust studies.

References:

Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. Hachette UK.

Loewen, J. W. (2008). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong. The New Press.

Sullivan, S. (2014). Good white people: The problem with middle-class white anti-racism. Suny Press.

Wang, Q. (2016). Why should we all be cultural psychologists? Lessons from the study of social cognition. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(5), 583-596.


4. “I only hire/award/cite based on merit; that is what really counts for research and knowledge production; I don’t need to consider race, gender, or other social grouping.”

We consider academia to be an institution that practices objective meritocracy, which rewards all academics equally in terms of citations, jobs, and awards. After all, that is how we would like to think we all achieved our success! This misconception sets us up for a false dichotomy between merit/excellence and diversity. Unfortunately, the reality is that our conceptions of merit and excellence are often subjective, flawed, and themselves the product of implicit bias and/or structural bias (Ford et al., 2018; Guarino & Borden, 2017). For example, biomedical research that focuses on health disparities, which is more commonly pursued by Black scientists than White ones, is often assessed as less impactful and meritorious by grant reviewers (Hoppe et al., 2019), despite its demonstrated importance in our multi-racial society.

In another example of academia’s inconsistency, minoritized scholars innovate at higher rates than well-represented ones but these novel contributions are more likely to be discounted and less likely to earn them academic positions (Hofstra et al., 2020). Indeed, our reliance on flawed proxies for merit or excellence, like where a scholar has published (Bendels et al., 2018) and/or trained (Clauset et al., 2015), further maintains marginalization, given that these proxies themselves reproduce bias and maintain homogeneity. Finally, considering minoritized identities, allows for a more holistic and equitable evaluation of scholars and their scholarship by acknowledging the often challenging experiences that minoritized scholars have had to navigate (Funk & Parker, 2018), and the wider array of expertise that they have had to develop (Zuroski, 2018), during their training and careers. This expertise should be reflected in our hiring and promotion decisions, as well as in how we cite research work and grant awards.

References:

Bendels, M. H., Müller, R., Brueggmann, D., & Groneberg, D. A. (2018). Gender disparities in high-quality research revealed by Nature Index journals. PloS one, 13(1), e0189136. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0189136

Clauset, A., Arbesman, S., & Larremore, D. B. (2015). Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks. Science advances, 1(1), e1400005. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005?hc_location=ufi

Ford, H. L., Brick, C., Blaufuss, K., & Dekens, P. S. (2018). Gender inequity in speaking opportunities at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting. Nature Communications, 9(1), 1-6.

Funk, C., & Parker, K. (2018). Blacks in STEM jobs are especially concerned about diversity and discrimination in the workplace. Pew Research Center, available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/01/09/blacks-in-stem-jobs-are-especially-concerned-about-diversity-and-discrimination-in-the-workplace/ (accessed 14 February 2019).

Guarino, C. M., & Borden, V. M. (2017). Faculty service loads and gender: Are women taking care of the academic family? Research in Higher Education, 58(6), 672-694.

Hofstra, B., Kulkarni, V. V., Galvez, S. M. N., He, B., Jurafsky, D., & McFarland, D. A. (2020). The diversity–innovation paradox in science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(17), 9284-9291. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9284

Hoppe, T. A., Litovitz, A., Willis, K. A., Meseroll, R. A., Perkins, M. J., Hutchins, B. I., … & Santangelo, G. M. (2019). Topic choice contributes to the lower rate of NIH awards to African-American/black scientists. Science Advances, 5(10), eaaw7238. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/10/eaaw7238

Zuroski, E. (2018). Holding patterns: On academic knowledge and labor. Medium. April 5. https://medium.com/@zugenia/holding-patterns-on-academic-knowledge-and-l…


5. “The bottom line is, there just aren’t as many Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), or members of other historically marginalized groups, who want to work in my field or apply for our positions.”

Statements such as this refer to what is colloquially known as the “leaky pipeline.” There are at least two problems with this argument. One is that the pipeline isn’t as leaky as we think it is, and the second, is that the solution to this argument is both to fix the leak and to fix the filter that creates this problem in the first place (i.e., to redouble our efforts to stop the practice of letting only certain people through the “pipe”). By using evidence-based practices associated with “slow thinking” in evaluation and assessment, we can limit the impact of cognitive biases in faculty recruitment and hiring to give historically marginalized job candidates a fair shot at success, by truly considering their merits and the full scope of our needs.

Let’s talk about the pipeline for BIPOC scholars as an example. While it is still true that in most fields in academia the underrepresentation of minoritized populations continues to be a significant issue, it is also true that, historically speaking, there have never been as many qualified Ph.Ds of color as there are now (American Academy of Arts and Sciences). In all fields the problems stem, instead, from some common sources: program barriers that weed people out early instead of cultivating their potential, the lack of faculty of color that can most effectively function as role models for BIPOC students, and the inability in many fields to properly assess BIPOC academic candidates.  

Now let’s talk about the fair shot at success. According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019) “In 2015, the share of humanities doctorates completed by students from traditionally underrepresented racial/ethnic groups was 10.5%, four percentage points greater than in 1995 and the largest share recorded over the time period.” In other words: in ten years the number of Ph.Ds of color in the Humanities had almost doubled. The same source adds that: “In 2015, the share of humanities master’s degrees awarded to students from traditionally underrepresented racial/ethnic groups was 14.9%, up from 8.2% in 1995.” The data points t  the potential already within reach and the need to strengthen the pipeline from the masters to the doctoral level. In many fields we already have more qualified BIPOC candidates than ever before, but we seem to have difficulty hiring them in sufficient numbers to make a difference. The way out of this loop is giving BIPOC job candidates a fair shot at success, by truly considering their merits and the full scope of our needs.

References:

American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (2019). Racial/Ethnic Distribution of Advanced Degrees in the Humanities. https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/racialethnic-distribution-advanced-degrees-humanities

Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.


6. “Diversity initiatives are unfair to Whites or non-minorities; it’s reverse discrimination.”

For this statement to capture accurately the relationship between diversity initiatives and bias against Whites, demographic data should demonstrate a dramatic decrease in White faculty and a dramatic increase in non-White faculty, especially over the last two decades, when significant efforts have been made by higher educational institutions to diversity their faculty. In other words, if reverse discrimination was in fact operating, then the number of White faculty would have decreased after decades of diversity work, specifically at the University of California. The truth is that diversity initiatives lessen only marginally, the disadvantages minority groups face, while preserving opportunities for non-minority groups. For example, the National Science Foundation has a fellowship program that is focused on increasing the representation of minority scholars in higher education, yet 80% of the Graduate Research Fellowship Program awardees are White (NORC, 2014). Notably, this percentage is the same percentage as thirteen years earlier (Sheppard et al., 2001). Many programs and initiatives reveal similar findings. To increase BIPOC faculty in higher education will take a concerted, deliberate effort to level the playing field: Minoritized people face many kinds of biases in academia, including biases in performance evaluations, recommendation letters, citations, and funding from grant agencies. We can work to counteract these biases, including using simple techniques that have been shown to decrease bias. For example, when making hiring decisions, we can establish procedures and rubrics that are deployed consistently across all candidates; for example, search committees can decide to spend five minutes listing plusses relevant to their search criteria and five minutes listing negatives, and then use these lists in thinking about candidates’ performances (Bauer & Baltes, 2002). Decreasing bias can allow everyone to participate in a more level playing field.

References:

Bauer, C. C., & Baltes, B. B. (2002). Reducing the effects of gender stereotypes on performance evaluations. Sex Roles, 47(9), 465-476.

Hoffer, Tom and Kirby, Sheila Nataraj. (2014). Evaluation of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program. NORC at the University of Chicago.

Sheppard, E., Rutledge, J., & Johnson, J. (2001). Merit Criteria, Eligibility and Diversity in the NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition.


7. “Education is the great equalizer.”

United States citizens and North Americans, including immigrant populations, tend to believe that schooling and education function as “great equalizers.” Particularly in the post-Brown v. Board of Education era, public schools aspire towards multicultural diversity as an emblem of goodness and indicator of upward economic progress. However, the literature on the relationship between upward mobility and educational attainment challenges this basic tenet. . Not only are children in the United States “tracked,” such that the likelihood that a child will or will not attend college can be predicted with reasonable accuracy as early as preschool (Putnam 2015), children and young adults’ experiences of m school itself can vary profoundly by race, class, and gender (Shange 2019; Bastedo and Jaquette 2011).

In general, the U.S. has seen slowed economic growth since the 1970s; the “concentration of that growth among the wealthy [has] slowed the pace of U.S. social mobility (Beller and Hout 2006).” Globally we see that “[l]arger social inequalities set limits on what education can achieve” (Marginson 2016). In the absence of broader efforts to ensure social equality, education, far from being “the great equalizer,” often reproduces profound inequity.

References:

Bastedo, Michael N. and Jaquette, Ozan. (2011). Running in Place: Low-Income Students and the Dynamics of Higher Education Stratification. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. 33(3). 318-339.

Beller, Emily and Hout, Michael. (2006). Intergenerational Social Mobility: The United States in Comparative Perspective. The Future of Children. 16(2). 19-36.

Marginson, Simon. (2016). The worldwide trend to high participation in higher education: dynamics of social stratification in inclusive systems. High Educ. 72. 413–434.

Putnam, Robert D. (2015). Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Shange, Savannah. (2019). Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco. Durham and London: Duke University Press.


8. “I don’t agree with racist sentiments, but people should be allowed to express their opinions and have debates.”

In a public institution of higher learning, “hate speech” and other types of biased statements and biased belief systems play no part in healthy and generative dialogue and debate. Rigorous and honest debate in a university context involves discussion, research, data, expertise and experiences, rather than provocation, incitement, and uninformed opinion (Rupert, 2017). For example, while people may be legally allowed to express racist opinions, they are not free of the responsibility and consequences of these statements within educational public institutions, the students they serve, and the campus climate to which they contribute.

Consider too that the view that biased statements should be permitted as not only a matter of free speech, but of scholarly debate, may stem itself from a position of privilege. For example, White people may have the privilege of being able to discuss and debate racism as a detached scholarly exercise because they are not directly harmed by racism. For others, racism is not some theoretical concept, but a concrete reality, which precludes an emotionless debate. BIPOC should never be forced to explain and defend their lived experiences and racial trauma for the sake of “debate.” The facts and the data clearly speak for themselves in validating the reality of racism and thus, the experience of those who suffer it.

In 1995, the UN released a Declaration of Principles on Tolerance, which proclaims that tolerance is not only a moral imperative, but a political and legal requirement (Unesco). The declaration notes that “the practice of tolerance does not mean toleration of social injustice.” This clause upholds Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance” – the idea that being completely tolerant of all ideas will allow the emergence of intolerant groups which, if left unchecked, will in turn stifle and destroy the entire framework of tolerance that permitted their formation (Popper). To act in accordance with these ideas, racist sentiments cannot be tolerated; they perpetuate discrimination and injustice, which threaten a tolerant society. They are also blind to the facts and data on the ground.

References:

Rupert, Maya. “I’m Done Debating Racism With the Devil: White people playing devil’s advocate in conversations about race are completely counterproductive to actual progress, 2017.

Unesco. United Nations Declaration of Principles on Tolerance, 1995 Unesco. (1995). Declaration of principles on tolerance. In 28th Session of the General Conference.

Popper, Karl. (1945) The Open Society and Its Enemies


9. “Focusing on anti-Black racism ignores the experiences of non-Black POC, in addition to ignoring the adverse effects of sexism, ableism, and other forms of oppression.”

It’s unfortunate that there are so many forms of discrimination and bias in academia. And it’s entirely accurate that we should attempt to address as many forms of bias as possible when trying to make academia more equitable, along the lines not only of race, but also of gender, sexual identification, disability status, and ethnicity, among other ways (Crenshaw 1991). However, the attempt to address the bias these minoritized identities experience as distinct from one another obscures some realities about historical and contemporary racial discrimination. First, as a continuing legacy of slavery and colonialism, anti-blackness is a foundational but rarely acknowledged organizing principle of our country and our institutions (Hannah-Jones & Elliot, 2019). The existence of colorism in marginalized communities is another example of its debilitating effect (Dixon & Telles, 2017). Because we are reluctant to discuss this uncomfortable reality, we often seek to decenter race in our discussions about bias (DiAngelo, 2018), as this question illustrates. Last of all, and perhaps most importantly, these attempts to segregate minoritized identities and their experiences deliberately shifts the focus away from a common reality of the experience of most minoritized groups: that able-bodied, heterosexual White men have historically and systematically benefitted from how our universities and academic structures have been constructed, at the expense of the success of members of many minoritized groups. The data are clear in this regard. Focusing on anti-Blackness, and validating its effect on our institutions, provides an opportunity to better understand and ameliorate how racism and other forms of minoritization intersect to produce inequity.

References:

Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241-1299. doi:10.2307/1229039

DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press.

Dixon, A. R., & Telles, E. E. (2017). Skin color and colorism: Global research, concepts, and measurement. Annual Review of Sociology, 43, 405-424.

Hannah-Jones, N., & Elliott, M. N. (Eds.). (2019). The 1619 project. New York Times.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039?origin=crossref&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html


10. “Improving racial equity and inclusivity does not benefit my field as a whole.”

Diversifying our faculty will have an enormous positive impact on our fields, including benefitting everyone’s research and everyone’s students’ prospects. For example, women and scholars of color produce reliably more innovative scientific contributions, as assessed using data science techniques that measured newly-created relationships between concepts in research work (Hofstra et al., 2020). The researchers assessed almost all U.S. Ph.D. recipients across all science fields over a 38-year period. While the individuals who created this new knowledge were under-rewarded, the impactful discoveries and knowledge significantly advanced research. As another example, in an assessment of citations to law review articles over a 60-year period, those produced after a diversity policy was implemented were of demonstrably higher quality – they were cited more often (Chilton et al., 2022). The researchers included any diversity policy, from reserving seats on an editorial board for a member of a minority group to consideration of potential editors’ diversity statements. Racial equity and inclusivity have been repeatedly shown to advance fields and help all of us. After all, the research and editorial teams assessed in just these two studies included people from minority and majority groups. Everyone’s work was cited more and had more impact.

References:

Chilton, A., Driver, J., Masur, J. S., & Rozema, K. (2022). Assessing Affirmative Action’s

Diversity Rationale. Columbia Law Review, 122(2).

Hofstra, B., Kulkarni, V. V., Galvez, S. M. N., He, B., Jurafsky, D., & McFarland, D. A. (2020).

The diversity–innovation paradox in science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(17), 9284-9291.


Last modified: Nov 27, 2024