Evidence-based Fair Hiring Best Practices


Our Top Twelve Evidence-based Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Best Practices for Advancing Faculty Diversity and Equity.

Recruitment

Think carefully about how desired research area is listed in the ad

Stacy, Angelica, Goulden, Marc, Frasch, Karie and Broughton, Janet. (2018). Searching for a Diverse Faculty: Data-Driven Recommendations. Report from UC Berkeley.

Searching for a Diverse Faculty: Data-Driven Recommendations

From the Executive Summary. The data-driven recommendation is to describe the search area in a way that was likely to tap especially rich applicant pools of women and URMs. The results were especially striking when the search description explicitly mentioned research interests that included women or minorities.

Attending workshops improves uptake of recommendations

Denise Sekaquaptewa, Koji Takahashi, Janet Malley, Keith Herzog, Sara Bliss. (2019) An evidence-based faculty recruitment workshop influences departmental hiring practice perceptions among university faculty. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal. 38(7). 3-24.

An evidence-based faculty recruitment workshop influences departmental hiring practice perceptions among university faculty

From Article. Findings: Faculty had more favorable attitudes toward equitable search strategies if they had attended a workshop or if they were in a department where more of their colleagues had. Workshop attendance also increased intentions to act on two of three recommendations measured. Practical implications: The present studies demonstrate that an evidence-based recruitment workshop can lead faculty to adopt more favorable attitudes toward strategies that promote equitable hiring.

Balanced applicant pools lead to more equitable outcomes

Heilman, Madeline E. (1980). The impact of situational factors on personnel decisions concerning women: Varying the sex composition of the applicant pool. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance. 26(3). 386-395.

The impact of situational factors on personnel decisions concerning women: Varying the sex composition of the applicant pool

Abstract. One hundred male and female MBA students evaluated a woman applicant for a managerial position when the proportion of women in the applicant pool was varied. Results indicated that personnel decisions of both males and females were significantly more unfavorable when women represented 25% or less of the total pool. Additional findings suggest that this effect was mediated by the degree to which sex stereotypes predominated in forming impressions of applicants. The results were interpreted as supportive of the thesis that situational factors can function to reduce the adverse effects of sex stereotypes in employment settings.

Hiring Process

Diverse scholars are more innovative, but their work is taken up by others less than it should be

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.

The Diversity-Innovation Paradox in Science

Abstract. Prior work finds a diversity paradox: Diversity breeds innovation, yet underrepresented groups that diversify organizations have less successful careers within them. Does the diversity paradox hold for scientists as well? We study this by utilizing a near-complete population of ∼1.2 million US doctoral recipients from 1977 to 2015 and following their careers into publishing and faculty positions. We use text analysis and machine learning to answer a series of questions: How do we detect scientific innovations? Are underrepresented groups more likely to generate scientific innovations? And are the innovations of underrepresented groups adopted and rewarded? Our analyses show that underrepresented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty. However, their novel contributions are devalued and discounted: For example, novel contributions by gender and racial minorities are taken up by other scholars at lower rates than novel contributions by gender and racial majorities, and equally impactful contributions of gender and racial minorities are less likely to result in successful scientific careers than for majority groups. These results suggest there may be unwarranted reproduction of stratification in academic careers that discounts diversity’s role in innovation and partly explains the underrepresentation of some groups in academia.

Scholars are not equitably rewarded for their achievements

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)

Gender disparities in high-quality research revealed by Nature Index journals

From Abstract. Women are underrepresented at prestigious authorships compared to men (Prestige Index = -0.42). The underrepresentation accentuates in highly competitive articles attracting the highest citation rates, namely, articles with many authors and articles that were published in highest-impact journals. More specifically, a large negative correlation between the 5-Year-Impact-Factor of a journal and the female representation at prestigious authorships was revealed (r(52) = -.63, P < .001). Women publish fewer articles compared to men (39.0% female authors are responsible for 29.8% of all authorships) and are underrepresented at productivity levels of more than 2 articles per author. Articles with female key authors are less frequently cited than articles with male key authors. The gender-specific differences in citation rates increase the more authors contribute to an article. Distinct differences at the journal, journal category, continent and country level were revealed. The prognosis for the next decades forecast a very slow harmonization of authorships odds between the two genders.

Where a scholar trained is not as important as where they end up working

Way, S. F., Morgan, A. C., Larremore, D. B., & Clauset, A. (2019). Productivity, prominence, and the effects of academic environment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 116(22), 10729-10733.

Productivity, prominence, and the effects of academic environment

Abstract. Faculty at prestigious institutions produce more scientific papers, receive more citations and scholarly awards, and are typically trained at more-prestigious institutions than faculty with less prestigious appointments. This imbalance is often attributed to a meritocratic system that sorts individuals into more-prestigious positions according to their reputation, past achievements, and potential for future scholarly impact. Here, we investigate the determinants of scholarly productivity and measure their dependence on past training and current work environments. To distinguish the effects of these environments, we apply a matched-pairs experimental design to career and productivity trajectories of 2,453 early-career faculty at all 205 PhD-granting computer science departments in the United States and Canada, who together account for over 200,000 publications and 7.4 million citations. Our results show that the prestige of faculty’s current work environment, not their training environment, drives their future scientific productivity, while current and past locations drive prominence. Furthermore, the characteristics of a work environment are more predictive of faculty productivity and impact than mechanisms representing preferential selection or retention of more-productive scholars by more-prestigious departments. These results identify an environmental mechanism for cumulative advantage, in which an individual’s past successes are “locked in” via placement into a more prestigious environment, which directly facilitates future success. The scientific productivity of early-career faculty is thus driven by where they work, rather than where they trained for their doctorate, indicating a limited role for doctoral prestige in predicting scientific contributions.

Last modified: Jun 04, 2025