This methodology has had an enormous impact. As we discussed last month, for a 2018-2019 search in the Life Sciences, UC Berkeley rejected 76% of the applicants without even considering their research, teaching skills, or academic merits (out of 893 qualified applicants, 679 were eliminated solely because their diversity statements were deemed inadequate). This methodology has also resulted in extreme racial and gender disparities. In 2018-2019 UC Davis ran eight open discipline searches using this methodology. With all the other searches conducted at UC Davis in 2018-2019, under 10% of the applicant pool were minorities, just above 5% of the finalists, and 2.3% of hires. But in the pilot searches nearly a third of the applicants were minorities, over 80% of the finalists, and a full 100% of those hired were minorities. The results for female hires was similarly sharp, with 87.5% of those hired through the pilot program being women compared to 45.5% campus wide.I am not condoning this methodology. But we have to consider it in context. For centuries academia has been plagued with sexism. How would you feel if 90 percent of your hiring or tenure committee was all female? Because that is what has been happening to female academics.
Why should I care, as long as I was evaluated fairly based on my accomplishments and not on my gender? That is in fact what women face in STEM fields since the 1980s: a lack of sexism, or if anything, _reverse_ sexism.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00461520.2017.1396462
Here is what these hiring audits reveal about the female advantage in real-world hiring of tenure-track applicants in scientific fields in the United States and Canada: There is a female advantage in eight of the nine large-scale studies dating back to the 1980s. However, the magnitude of the female advantage is quite variable. Sometimes it is on the order of 2-to-1 female hiring advantage, but most of the time the female advantage is smaller. Consider: A National Research Council (NRC; 2009) national survey of six scientific disciplines examined faculty hiring experiences and policies related to teaching loads and start-up packages from 1995 to 2003. This audit included more than 1,800 faculty members' experiences in nearly 500 departments at 89 research-intensive universities in the United States. Although a smaller proportion of female PhDs applied for tenure-track positions at these 89 universities, those who did apply were both invited to interview more often and were offered positions more often than predicted by their fraction of the applicant pool.
For example, in the field of mathematics, only 20% of applicants for tenure-track positions were female, but 28% of those invited to interview were female and 30% of those offered tenure-track positions were female. Table 1 shows that in all six scientific disciplines studied by the NRC, five of which are GEMP fields, female applicants were invited to interview and offered positions at rates higher than those of men. The largest female advantages were in the math-intensive discipline of engineering which were associated with a 2-to-1 or greater female advantage.