The Faculty Hiring Process for Women and Men in Academic STEM

Assessing Fairness in Evaluation Ratings and the Interview Experience

Principal Investigators: Mary Blair-Loy, Pamela Cosman, and Stephanie Fraley.

Summary:

The underrepresentation of women faculty in STEM limits the potential for scientific creativity and reduces available role models for women undergraduate and graduate students pursuing STEM careers. Research on implicit bias indicates that women candidates for faculty positions may be less likely to be selected than men. It is critical to understand the experiences of hiring committee members, and of candidates for faculty positions, in order to advance STEM academic hiring practices. The researchers investigate whether and, if so, how bias against women creeps into the process of selecting and interviewing tenure-track faculty candidates at a highly ranked public research university. 

One strand of this project studies video-recordings of the candidates’ formal job talks to determine social interactions, such as the number and tone of questions and interruptions, which may vary depending on the candidate’s gender and the proportion of faculty who have received training in inclusive recruitment practices.

A second strand analyzes rubric ratings for semi-finalist and finalist job candidates.  Requiring faculty to fill out rubrics rating each candidate is considered a best practice because this encourages systematic evaluation on several pre-determined criteria and moves inappropriate criteria (e.g., family status) off the table. We compare rubric ratings and outcomes to independent assessment of scholarly production and impact, based on measures extracted from candidates’ CVs.  We find evidence that rubrics are valuable yet also that subtle gender bias may be getting smuggled into faculty assessments of candidates.   

A third strand collects qualitative data from interviews with a diverse group of advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and newly hired faculty to examine if men and women self-report being treated differently during academic STEM interviews, and to determine if men and women react differently to similar interview events such as interrupting.

Publications:

Blair-Loy, Mary, Laura Rogers, Daniela Glaser, Anne Wong, Danielle Abraham and Pamela C. Cosman. 2017. "Gender in Engineering Departments: Are There Gender Differences in Interruptions of Academic Job Tallks?". Social Sciences. doi: 10.3390/socsci6010029.     Download PDF

Funder: National Science Foundation (Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.)