STRIDE: Search Committees

Jeanette N Cleveland, Ronald M Festa, & Linda Montgomery, 1988
Previous research suggests that one basis for age discrimination involves the perceptions we hold about older people. However, situational factors may influence the extent to which these perceptions affect our decisions. In the present study, one situational factor, the age composition of the applicant pool, was varied to determine the degree to which age bias in simulated personnel decisions can be reduced. It was hypothesized that as the number of older applicants in an applicant pool increased, an older applicant seeking employment would receive more favorable ratings. Further, it was hypothesized as the number of older applicants in the pool increased, there would be a shift in the perception of the age-type of the job. The results of the study partially supported both hypotheses. Implications for further research on bias in decisions and for organizational recruitment strategies are discussed.

Dan-Olof Rooth, 2010
This is the first study providing empirical support for automatically activated associations inducing discriminatory behavior among recruiters in a real-life hiring situation. Two different field experiments on ethnic discrimination in hiring are combined with a measure of employers' automatic attitudes and performance stereotypes toward Arab-Muslim men relative to Swedish men using the Implicit Association Test. The results show that the probability to invite Arab-Muslim job applicants decreases by five percentage points when the recruiter has a one standard deviation stronger negative implicit association toward Arab-Muslim men. This suggests that automatic processes may exert a significant impact on employers' hiring decisions, offering new insights into labor market discrimination.

Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner, 2002
Turner, C. S. V. (2002). Diversifying the faculty : a guidebook for search committees . Association of American Colleges & Universities.

Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner, 2005
This monograph suggests ways in which an institution can diversify its faculty and facilitate the work of the search committee before a candidate ever reaches the interview stage. It outlines a step-by-step process to improve the likelihood of a successful search, and it recommends items to consider after a hire is confirmed to ensure that the new faculty member will be more likely to stay. The sections are: (1) Before the Search Begins; (2) The Search Process; and (3) After the Search. Appendixes contain a checklist of best practices, a list of leading institutions for minority Ph.D.s, a list of baccalaureate institutions identified as producers of numbers of female doctorates; and a list of Web resources of programs for building diverse faculties. An annotated bibliography lists 59 sources for additional information. (Contains 36 references.) (SLD)

Frances Trix & Carolyn Psenka, 2003
This study examines over 300 letters of recommendation for medical faculty at a large American medical school in the mid-1990s, using methods from corpus and discourse analysis, with the theoretical perspective of gender schema from cognitive psychology. Letters written for female applicants were found to differ systematically from those written for male applicants in the extremes of length, in the percentages lacking in basic features, in the percentages with doubt raisers (an extended category of negative language, often associated with apparent commendation), and in frequency of mention of status terms. Further, the most common semantically grouped possessive phrases referring to female and male applicants ('her teaching,' 'his research') reinforce gender schema that tend to portray women as teachers and students, and men as researchers and professionals.

Sheila T. Gregory, 1998
By the year 2000 one-third or more of the nation's population will be composed of African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, Asians, and other minority and immigrant groups. It is expected that two-thirds of the nation's aging professorate will have to be replaced by the year 2000, and in the next century or two, women and minorities will out number non-minority men across the board. Unless more effective methods of recruitment and retention arc developed, few persons of color will be likely to assume faculty positions in American colleges and universities.

Gertrude J Fraser & Dawn E Hunt, 2011
Many universities have experienced success at improving student, but not faculty, diversity. This paper examines how, over the past few years, a major U.S. research university made significant progress in recruiting faculty candidates from underrepresented groups. The paper situates this progress in the earlier context of a racial incident that disrupted the community's sense of order and civility. It was in the aftermath of this critical incident that a galvanized collective created positive conditions for change. We show that insiders' tacit knowledge can provide key clues to successful organizational change. In particular, we offer our experience of creating a university-wide, online tutorial on recruiting diverse faculty that every search committee member is required to take. Our case also demonstrates that organizational context and history are important factors to consider in understanding why specific faculty life initiatives succeed or flounder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)

Beth McMurtrie, 2016
In the often subjective faculty-search process, some colleges are taking new steps to bring a wider spectrum of candidates to the table.

Madeline E Heilman, 1980
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.

Daryl G Smith, Caroline S Turner, Nana Osei-Kofi, & Sandra Richards, 2004
While campuses engage in efforts to diversify their faculties, these efforts are perhaps the least successful of diversity initiatives. This study investigates the conditions under which faculty are hired. The findings highlight the significance of intentional strategies for the hiring of underrepresented faculty of color.

Claudia Goldin, & Cecilia Rouse, 2000
A change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras--adoption of "blind" auditions with a "screen" to conceal the candidate's identity from the jury--provides a test for sex-biased hiring. Using data from actual auditions, in an individual fixed-effects framework, we find that the screen increases the probability a woman will be advanced and hired. Although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction, the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras.

Cynthia S Jones & Mark C Urban, 2013
In this article the authors discuss bias against women as scientists. Topics include an overview of research by C. A. Moss-Racusin and colleagues that revealed intrinsic bias in the hiring process of faculty at universities, the search for an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department using a gender-blind search method, and the institutional-based challenges of conducting a gender-blind search.

Cynthia S. Jones & Mark C. Urban, 2013
Jones, C. S., & Urban, M. C. (2013). Promise and Pitfalls of a Gender-Blind Faculty Search. Bioscience, 63(8), 611–612. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2013.63.8.3

Allen I Huffcutt & Phillip L Roth, 1998
The purpose of this investigation was to assess the effect of race on employment interview evaluations. A meta-analysis of 31 studies found that both Black and Hispanic applicants received interview ratings that on average were only about one quarter of a standard deviation lower than those for White applicants. Thus, interviews as a whole do not appear to affect minorities nearly as much as mental ability tests. Results also suggested that (a) high-structure interviews have lower group differences on average than low-structure interviews, (b) group differences tend to decrease as the complexity of the job increases, and (c) group differences tend to be higher when there is a greater proportion of a minority in the applicant pool. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.