Handbook for Faculty Searches and Hiring [pdf]

PREPARED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE ADVANCE PROGRAM

HANDBOOK FOR

Faculty Searches and Hiring

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction .................................................................... 3

II. Initiating the Search Process ....................................................... 6

Composition of the Committee .................................................... 6

Defining the Position ............................................................ 6

Posting the Position ............................................................. 7

Language for Announcing Positions ................................................ 7

The Importance of Dual Career Considerations ...................................... 7

Person-Specific Faculty Hiring ................................................... 10

III. Committee Activity before the Search Begins ......................................... 14

Reviewing the National Pool ..................................................... 14

Reviewing Past Departmental Searches ........................................... 14

Initial Discussions of the Search Committee’s Charge ................................ 15

Issues to Cover in the First Search Committee Meeting ............................... 16

IV. Recruiting Activities during the Search .............................................. 17

Broadening the Pool ............................................................ 17

Using Active Recruiting Practices ................................................. 18

How to Avoid Having Active Recruitment Efforts Backfire ............................. 18

Conducting a Fair Selection Process .............................................. 18

Documenting the Search ........................................................ 18

Communicating Promptly and Courteously with Candidates ........................... 19

Reviewing Applications with Objective Criteria ...................................... 19

Creating the Short List .......................................................... 20

Inviting Candidates to Interview .................................................. 21

V. Handling Campus Visits .......................................................... 22

Planning for Effective Information-Gathering ....................................... 22

Making a Good Impression ...................................................... 23

Making the Final Decision or Recommendation ..................................... 25

Candidate Evaluation Template ................................................... 26

VI. Final Stages of the Search Process: Negotiating the Offer ................................ 27

VII. Getting Off to a Good Start ........................................................ 29

VIII. Evaluating the Search ............................................................ 29

Appendix 1: Sample Search Committee Charge .......................................... 30

Appendix 2: Active Recruiting Resources ................................................ 31

Appendix 3: Reading Lists ........................................................... 33

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

The President’s Diversity Letter should be distributed at least once per year by each school and college in one or more

of their major recruiting materials. The letter is as follows:

Welcome to the University of Michigan. As one of our nation’s great public

universities, Michigan is most proud of its astonishing breadth and depth of

academic excellence.

At the very core of our excellence is our longstanding commitment to build

and nurture a campus community characterized by a diversity of people,

heritage, academic disciplines, and scholarly pursuits. We know that a broad

spectrum of perspectives leads to richer educational experiences and

intellectual engagement for everyone. Our many and varied voices must all be

heard and equally valued. They help us challenge one another’s preconceived

notions and expand our understanding. The fabric of our community is simply

more vibrant when it is a diverse one.

We know, too, that as a public university we must strive to promote the

diversity reflected in the state, the nation and the world we serve.

We cherish the value expressed by the University’s first president, Henry

Philip Tappan: “We must take the world as full as it is.” All of us have a

responsibility to recruit, welcome, and retain the finest faculty, as well as the

most talented students and staff, of all backgrounds, so we can further

enhance Michigan’s academic distinction as well as the vitality of our campus.

The U-M Senate Assembly, the governing body representing faculty from the

Ann Arbor, Flint, and Dearborn campuses, has voiced its “commitment to

the value of diversity and urges that all members of the University— faculty,

students, staff, and administration—work together to develop new

approaches to maintain diversity as a critical component of student education,

research, and service at the University of Michigan.”

It is my honor to be part of an institution that has been a true leader in its

continuous pursuit of diversity within higher education. We remain committed

to the highest aspirations for a diverse future. I invite you to join this

remarkable community, adding your unique perspective to our richly varied

viewpoints and contributions.

Sincerely,

Mark Schlissel, MD, PhD

President

2 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Hiring and retaining exceptional academic colleagues is one of the most important things we

do as faculty members. We value the University of Michigan’s stimulating, welcoming, and

diverse environment, and we want to continue to attract world-class artists, scholars, and

students. Thus we must actively recruit talented colleagues, not just during formal searches,

but at every opportunity: socially and professionally, one-on-one and via anity groups, at

conferences, and while performing ﬁeld work.

Eorts to recruit, retain, and promote diverse faculty have

produced slow and uneven results. This has been the case

both nationally and at the University of Michigan. Since the

summer of 2002, initially under the auspices of the

U-M’s NSF ADVANCE grant, the Strategies and Tactics for

Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence (STRIDE)

Committee has given presentations to search committees

and other interested faculty and administrators aimed at

helping with the recruiting and retention of women and

other minorities underrepresented among the faculty (e.g.,

racial and ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, people with

disabilities). This Handbook for Faculty Searches and Hiring

is designed to integrate and summarize the recruitment and

hiring practices that have been identiﬁed nationally and by

the STRIDE committee as eective, practical, and fair. This

faculty recruitment handbook has been updated regularly

and this revision was completed in the summer of 2018.

The present version incorporates valuable material from

the Oce of the Provost Academic Aairs Faculty Hiring

Manual developed in 2013 by a committee whose members

included Lester P. Monts, Derek B. Collins, Alan V. Deardor,

Carmen R. Green, S. Jack Hu, Maya Kobersy, Carla O’Connor,

Catherine Shaw, Anthony Walesby, and Gretchen Weir. This

document is a combined product of the ADVANCE Program

and the Oce of the Provost committee, and supersedes

all previous faculty recruitment handbooks. It reﬂects

our collective best judgments about best practices. The

Handbook for Faculty Searches and Hiring will be reviewed

annually and updated as needed to respond to relevant new

research ﬁndings.

The STRIDE committee is composed of a diverse group

of senior faculty who are able to advise individuals and

departments through presentations, detailed and targeted

advice, or focused discussions as needed on hiring practices

aimed at increasing both the diversity and excellence of the

I. INTRODUCTION

3UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

faculty. Although STRIDE was initially focused on faculty in

science and engineering, in 2006 the Provost expanded its

portfolio to include all schools and colleges in the University.

Several times a year STRIDE oers a workshop for search

committee members and other faculty entitled “Workshop

on Faculty Recruitment for Diversity and Excellence.” The

most recent PowerPoint slides for the presentation are

accessible at the following URL:

advance.umich.edu/stride

After several years of experience with the STRIDE

committee and several other related activities, ADVANCE

was able to report real progress in the recruitment of women

in each of the three colleges that employ the largest number

of scientists and engineers at the University (College of

Engineering, LSA Natural Sciences, and Medical School

Basic Sciences). Before STRIDE began, the average rate

of hiring new women faculty in STEM ﬁelds was 13% (as

a proportion of all new faculty hired). In the years since

STRIDE began (AY2003–2016), the rate has averaged 31%

(a statistically signiﬁcant increase). While many factors no

doubt contributed to departments’ or programs’ willingness

and ability to hire more women, STRIDE is the intervention

that most directly provided ideas, tools, and best practices

to aid in recruitment.

Moreover, some particular departments have reported

especially rapid progress. For example, before the ADVANCE

Program, the U-M Chemistry Department’s average

representation of women in their applicant pool (1998–99

to 2002–03) was 10%. After the ADVANCE Program and

the Department’s adoption of “open searches,” the average

representation of women in the applicant pool rose to

18%. The percentage of underrepresented minority faculty

also increased from 2% in AY2001 to 11% in AY2017. In the

Department of Astronomy, the number of women on the

tenure track increased from 0 in AY2001 to 5—or 26%—in

AY2017. Rates of underrepresented minority faculty did not

change over this same time period but were relatively high

(11% in AY2017). Both departments—which participated

actively in ADVANCE programs and employed recommended

hiring practices—have become nationally recognized for

the outstanding quality and diversity of their faculty hiring

during this period.

The larger context for faculty hiring activities includes both

national and federal mandates, state legal constraints, and

University commitments. As then-President Coleman stated

in her remarks to the community after the 2006 passage of

Michigan’s Proposal 2,“The University of Michigan embraces,

promotes, wants, and believes in diversity.” Laurita Thomas,

Associate Vice President for Human

Resources, expressed the following views in a letter to the U-M

community:

“...The passage of Proposal 2 does not change our

commitment, nor does it alter our employment practices or

the protections and requirements of various federal and state

laws including the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, Title IX of the

Education Amendments, the Americans with Disabilities Act,

and Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, which prohibits

a wide array of discrimination extending far beyond issues of

race and gender.

“We must continue to work diligently to recruit and retain the

best faculty and sta by creating a community that seeks,

welcomes, and defends diversity. We will do so in compliance

with state and federal laws, and federal law requires that

we continue to take armative steps (known as armative

action) in our employment process in order to adhere to

the equal employment opportunity and armative action

provisions of Executive Order 11246 regarding race, gender,

color, religion, and national origin required of all federal

contractors. Proposal 2 speciﬁcally states that it does not

prohibit actions that are required to establish or maintain

eligibility for any federal program, if ineligibility would result in

a loss of federal funds to the state.” Speciﬁcally, the document

explains that this means that:

• The University’s nondiscrimination policy remains in

full force and eect (see SPG 201.35 spg.umich.edu/

sites/default/files/201x35.pdf).

• A host of federal and state civil rights laws, including

those discussed above, continue to be in eect and

applicable to the University.

• The University must continue to adhere to all the

requirements of Executive Order 11246.

• As it relates to the employment process, Executive

Order 11246 requires all federal contractors, such

as U-M, to take armative steps to ensure its

employment process is fair and equitable and oers

equal opportunity in hiring and employment. The

types of armative steps required include a focus on

recruiting and outreach, such as casting the widest net

possible when conducting an employment search.

• Executive Order 11246 also requires that federal

contractors not discriminate against job applicants or

employees.

• The University’s standard statement in employment

ads, “A Non-Discriminatory/ Armative Action

Employer” or similar language such as “Armative

Action/Equal Opportunity Employer” is required by

Executive Order 11246 and must continue to be used.

4 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Further information regarding the University’s

nondiscrimination statement, its employment diversity, and

its armative action obligations can be obtained from the

Oce of Institutional Equity.

hr.umich.edu/oie

This handbook is designed to provide guidance on how to

recognize and recruit outstanding colleagues. Its techniques

will increase the probability of identifying and attracting

the best candidates, while helping us, as representatives

of the University, demonstrate and articulate U-M’s

values. We believe that diversity, academic excellence,

and enhanced student learning are so closely linked that

we should hire and retain excellent faculty from a diverse

array of backgrounds and experiences whenever possible.

Whether you are involved in a formal search or recruiting

in other ways, it is important that you provide opportunity

to all applicants, including scholars and artists from

underrepresented groups.

The process that meets our need for excellence also

addresses our desire for inclusiveness. This manual outlines

the multiple steps of the process:

• Initiating the Search Process

• Committee Activity Before the Search Begins

• Recruiting Activities During the Search

• Handling Campus Visits

• Final Stages of the Search Process: Negotiating the

Oer

• Getting O to a Good Start

• Evaluating the Search

This manual also contains three appendices consisting of

a sample search committee charge, resources for active

recruiting, and a reading list containing pertinent articles

grouped by category.

This manual is not meant to supersede the existing

procedures in any particular school or college but rather to

encourage consistent and good practices across campus.

The workshops provided by STRIDE are an important and

useful complement to the information provided here.

Several schools and colleges mandate STRIDE workshops

for chairs and/or search committee members, a practice we

recommend.

5UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

The composition of the search committee, the charge to the search committee, and the

deﬁnition/description of the faculty position are factors likely to have consequences for the

outcome of the search. It is important that these issues be addressed deliberately and early.

ADVANCE Program leadership is happy to meet with department chairs or other decision-

makers to help think through issues associated with the composition of, and charge to, the

search committee.

Composition of the Committee

• Search committees should include members with

dierent perspectives and expertise, and with a

demonstrated commitment to diversity.

• Search committees should include women and

underrepresented minorities whenever possible. Note,

however, that women and minorities are often asked

to do signiﬁcantly more service than majority males,

so it is important to keep track of their service load,

free them from less signiﬁcant service tasks, and/or

compensate them in other ways.

• It is often helpful to appoint some search

committee members from outside the

department.

Defining the Position

• Deﬁne the position in the widest

possible terms consistent with

the department’s needs. Aim for

consensus on speciﬁc specialties

or requirements, while planning to cast the hiring

net as broadly as possible. Make sure that the

position description does not needlessly limit the

pool of applicants. Some position descriptions may

unintentionally exclude female or minority candidates

by focusing too narrowly on subﬁelds in which few

specialize.

• Consider as important selection criteria for all

candidates (regardless of their own demographic

characteristics), the ability of the candidate to add

intellectual diversity to the department, to work

successfully with diverse students and colleagues, and

to mentor diverse students and junior colleagues.

• If women or minority candidates are hired

in areas that are not at the center of the

department’s focus and interest, they may

be placed in an unfavorable situation. It is

important to carefully think about how

the department will support not only

the individual, but also the

II. INITIATING THE SEARCH PROCESS

6 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

development of that person’s area within the

department. Consider “cluster hiring,” which involves

hiring more than one faculty member at a time to work

in the same specialization.

• Establish selection criteria and procedures for

screening, interviewing candidates, and keeping

records before advertising the position.

• Make sure that hiring criteria are directly related to

the requirements of the position, clearly understood,

and accepted by all members of the committee.

Ensure that criteria will not be assessed in terms of a

single limited indicator and that committee members

recognize the inevitable measurement uncertainty that

is associated with any given indicator.

• Get committee (and if appropriate, departmental)

consensus on the relative importance of dierent

selection criteria. Plan to create multiple short lists

based on dierent key criteria. (See “Creating the Short

List,” in section IV, below.)

Posting the Position

The job posting is the committee’s—and the University’s—

ﬁrst opportunity to clearly communicate about the position

to the wide range of candidates it hopes to attract. First

impressions are important. Make sure the announcement is

clear, accurate, and welcoming.

Many schools and departments advertise openings in the

Chronicle of Higher Education, Journal of Hispanic Higher

Education, Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, and major

journals in their ﬁeld. Most ﬁelds have resources—listservs,

email groups, etc.—that can help you identify or reach

diverse qualiﬁed candidates.

Language for Announcing Positions

Proactive language can be included in job descriptions to

indicate a department’s commitment to diversity. This may

make the position more attractive to female and minority

candidates. Examples include:

• “The college is especially interested in qualiﬁed

candidates who can contribute, through their research,

teaching, and/or service, to the diversity and excellence of

the academic community.”

• “The University is responsive to the needs of dual career

couples.”

• “Women, minorities, individuals with disabilities, and

veterans are encouraged to apply.”

• “The University of Michigan [or school/college/

department] seeks to recruit and retain a diverse

workforce as a reﬂection of our commitment to serve the

diverse people of Michigan, to maintain the excellence

of the University, and to oer our students richly varied

disciplines, perspectives, and ways of knowing and

learning.”

• “The school/department is interested in candidates

who have demonstrated commitment to excellence

by providing leadership in teaching research or service

toward building an equitable and diverse scholarly

environment.”

• “We will consider applicants knowledgeable in the

general area of xxx. There are several broad areas of

interest, including [several named]. In general, we give

higher priority to the overall originality and promise

of the candidate’s work rather than to the sub-area of

specialization. XXX University is an equal opportunity/

armative action employer and is committed to

increasing the diversity of its faculty. We welcome

nominations of and applications from anyone who would

bring additional dimensions to the University’s research,

teaching and clinical mission, including women, members

of minority groups, protected veterans, and individuals

with disabilities.”

• “The University of Michigan is committed to fostering and

maintaining a diverse work culture that respects the rights

and dignity of each individual, without regard to race,

color, national origin, ancestry, religious creed, sex, gender

identity, sexual orientation, gender expression, height,

weight, marital status, disability, medical condition, age,

or veteran status. The University of Michigan is supportive

of the needs of dual career couples and is an Equal

Opportunity/ Armative Action Employer.”

The race and/or gender of candidates may not be factors

considered in hiring decisions, but search committees may

indicate an interest in service, research, or other factors that

contribute to intellectual diversity or the ability of the unit

to meet the needs of diverse students. Manuals of our peer

institutions may be helpful, such as UCLA’s Faculty Search

Toolkit at https://ucla.app.box.com/v/searching-for-

excellence.

The Importance of Dual Career Considerations

Dual career considerations are important to many of our

faculty candidates. Our data show that men and women ask

for dual career assistance at similar rates. To alert candidates

to our interest in helping qualiﬁed spouses and partners

ﬁnd appropriate positions, you might consider including the

following statement in the ads for positions: “The University is

responsive to the needs of dual career couples.”

Details are listed below and can be found at the following

URL: hr.umich.edu/sites/default/files/bf-search-

manual-2010.pdf

7UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

SUBJECT

Age

Arrests/Convictions

Height and Weight

Citizenship

Education

Disability

Marital or

Parental Status

National Origin

Personal Finances

Photograph

Political Aliation

Organizations

Race or Color

Religion

Sex

Sexual Orientation

APPROPRIATE INQUIRIES

None.

May ask if any record of criminal

convictions and/or oenses exist, if all

applicants are asked.

None.

May ask questions about legal

authorization to work in the speciﬁc

position if all applicants are asked.

Inquiries about degree or equivalent

experience.

May ask about applicant’s ability to

perform job-related functions.

Whether applicant can meet work

schedule or job requirements. Should be

asked of all genders.

May ask if legally authorized to work in this

speciﬁc position if all applicants are asked.

None.

Inquiries about professional organizations

related to the position.

None.

Describe the work schedule and ask

whether applicant can work that

schedule. Should be asked of all applicants.

None.

INAPPROPRIATE INQUIRIES

Questions about age, date of birth, requests for

birth certiﬁcate.

Inquiries regarding arrest record.

Inquiries about the applicant’s height or weight.

May not ask if person is a U.S. citizen or what

citizenship the person holds.

None.

Question (or series of questions) that is likely to

solicit information about a disability.

Any inquiry about marital status, children,

pregnancy, or child care plans.

May not ask a person’s birthplace; if the person is a

U.S. citizen; questions about the person’s lineage,

ancestry, descent, or parentage; how the person

acquired the ability to speak/read/learn a foreign

language.

Inquiries regarding credit record, owning a home, or

garnishment record.

Any inquiry for a photograph prior to hire.

Inquiries about membership in a political party.

Inquiries about personal or professional

organizations suggesting race, sex, color, religion,

creed, national origin or ancestry, age, marital

status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender

expression, height, weight, disability, or veteran

status.

Comments about complexion or color of skin.

Inquiries about religious preferences, aliation,

denominations, church, and religious holidays

observed.

Inquiries regarding gender, gender expression or

gender identity.

Comments or questions about the applicant’s

sexual orientation.

8 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

At the same time, it is critical that all search committees

recognize that it is inappropriate and illegal for individuals’

marital or family status to aect evaluation of their

application. Knowledge—or guesses—about these matters

may not play any role in the committee’s deliberation about

candidates’ qualiﬁcations or the construction of the short

list. All committee members should recognize this and help

maintain a proper focus in committee deliberations, but the

committee chair has a special responsibility to ensure that

the discussion excludes any inappropriate considerations.

The U-M Human Resources and Armative Action

website includes a chart comparing legal questions with

discriminatory questions (see p 8).

Regardless of candidates’ personal characteristics (and

without knowing anything about an individual’s partner or

family status), one feature of the University environment

that is likely to be important and attractive to all candidates

is its promotion of a humane work setting. As you provide

that information to all candidates, keep these considerations

in mind:

• While it is common for academics to be partnered with

other academics, academic women are more likely

to be partnered with other academics than academic

men are. This means that disadvantages that aect

two-career academic couples have a disproportionate

impact on women.

• At the same time, recognize that there is variability

among women in their personal and household

circumstances. Do not assume one household type

(e.g., a husband and children) applies to all women.

• Make sure everyone on the search committee has

a good working knowledge of the U-M’s dual career

support programs. Consult the Provost’s Oce for

further information. Information is also available online

at provost.umich.edu/programs/pfip.html. This site

provides online resources for dual career partners

seeking employment. Other documents are available

by contacting the Provost’s Oce.

• Procedures vary somewhat in each school and college,

so search committee chairs should consult their

department chairs about the correct procedures they

should follow.

• Provide all candidates with copies of dual career

resources, which are also available online:

https://www.provost.umich.edu/programs/dual_

career/Dual_Career_Services_June2017.pdf

• Address perceptions that Ann Arbor, as a small city,

oers limited opportunities for a candidate’s spouse or

partner. Make sure candidates know about the diverse

employment possibilities their partners might ﬁnd not

only at the University, but also throughout Ann Arbor

and in the larger Southeast Michigan area. The Dual

Career oce can provide helpful information about

Ann Arbor and surrounding communities. (See contact

information above.)

• Identify someone in the department or outside it who

can oer to have a conﬁdential conversation (one not

to be conveyed to anyone else in the department) with

candidates about these issues. This person should be

well-informed about all programs supporting faculty

members’ families, and willing to describe or discuss

them with candidates, without

transmitting information

about the candidate’s

personal circumstances to

the department or the search

committee. For example, the

College of Engineering has

a committee of senior faculty women who volunteer

to serve as contacts for women candidates, and the

Associate Dean for Academic Aairs (ADAA) requires

that each female candidate meet with a member of this

committee.

• If a candidate does ask for help ﬁnding a relevant

posting for a spouse or partner, follow the procedures

appropriate to your school or college to arrange

interviews or other opportunities for the spouse or

partner as early in the hiring process as possible. Your

department chair is the best source on this, but it is

always possible to get information and assistance from

the Dual Career Coordinator in the Provost’s oce.

• As noted in other places within this handbook, make

sure all applicants for faculty positions are provided

with information about the University’s family friendly

policies.

The ADVANCE Program

can be reached by email at:

advanceprogr[email protected]

9UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Person-Specific Faculty Hiring

The hiring procedure most familiar to faculty involves a

search process, initiated with deﬁnition of a “position,”

posting of an ad for that position, and formal applications

reviewed by a search committee that is appointed to do that

job.

In contrast, person-speciﬁc faculty hiring involves

consideration of a faculty appointment at any rank for an

individual which did not arise in response to a job application

or a posted position. Person-speciﬁc hiring occurs most

often at the University of Michigan in the context of (1)

consideration of faculty partners for dual career positions;

(2) faculty appointments after special postdoctoral

programs aiming at faculty appointments (President’s

Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP), Society of Fellows,

Psychology’s Diversity Postdoc Program; National Center

for Institutional Diversity (NCID)); and (3) Provost’s Faculty

Initiative Program (PFIP) positions, sometimes referred to

as “target of opportunity” positions.

Each of these circumstances is slightly dierent, but all of

them share the feature that the candidate is not evaluated

in the context of a pool of applicants for that exact position.

Moreover, in each case, the department would need to

obtain a waiver of posting requirements from the relevant

HR oce, as set forth in SPG 201.22. See spg.umich.

edu/policy/201.22.In addition, hiring for person-speciﬁc

positions typically does not have a conventional timeframe

dictated by the norms of the discipline or the timing of the

posting of the ad; nor does it have a preexisting plan for the

funding of the appointment. Although there are many

resources to help with that funding, it must be arranged, and

normally some part of it comes from the unit.

Person-speciﬁc hiring is undertaken, however, with the same

long-term goal and expectation as other faculty hiring: that

any individual hired is brought into a unit (or in the case of

joint appointments, multiple units) as a full

member, because of the belief that the individual can make

a meaningful contribution as a faculty member. Therefore,

the unit(s) must be prepared to take on responsibility

for addressing that person’s needs for support and

development like those of any other faculty member at a

similar rank.

General Principles

Three primary principles underlie good unit practices in

considering individuals for person-speciﬁc hires:

1. Transparency and consistency. The unit has developed

clear, transparent processes for handling hiring of this

sort, which are accepted by the faculty. Ideally, these

processes should be discussed and developed before

any candidates are identiﬁed. Wherever possible these

processes should mirror those of hiring through the

conventional search process.

2. Respectful processes. All discussions about the

potential hire should be undertaken with the same

concern for a respectful assessment of a potential

colleague that would be present in any search, and all

interactions with the potential hire should convey that

tone of respect.

3. Equal treatment. Every stage in the process should be

undertaken with the potential outcome in mind that

the individual under consideration might become a

colleague in the department, one who deserves to be

accorded the same credibility and respect as any other

member of the faculty.

The dierent circumstances that lead to person-speciﬁc

consideration, and the wide diversity of micro-cultures

within the University make it impossible to recommend

particular practices for all units. However, optimal kinds

of practices are associated with the dierent stages in the

process.

Practices at Each Stage in the Process

Identifying the candidate

This stage depends on the type of candidate. Sometimes

individual candidates may be proposed from inside the unit

(e.g., for PFIP, for special postdocs, or some dual career

opportunities), or from outside (as for some dual career

opportunities). Units should be prepared for both kinds

of situations, and should recognize the potential value to

the department of both kinds of opportunities. In addition,

sometimes units create a standing or ad hoc ‘search’

committee that scans the ﬁeld for promising candidates

for one of these programs. Identity characteristics

(such as race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, gender

expression, or other characteristics listed in the University’s

nondiscrimination policy statement) must never be a factor

in identifying a candidate for consideration for person-

speciﬁc hires.

The PFIP program is described this way: “The Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Aairs provides supplemental resources to help schools and

colleges and other academic units to hire and retain faculty with a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion through scholarship, teaching and/or service;

to assist the dual career partners of tenure track and tenured faculty; and to respond to unique opportunities. Funds may be available to help units recruit or

retain tenure-track faculty or to develop speciﬁc programmatic areas (e.g., cluster hiring).” Further information is here: provost.umich.edu/programs/pfip.

html

10 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Unit consideration of the candidate

As noted above, units should develop a standard procedure

for consideration of such candidates that is already in place

before such a candidate is considered. It is best if more

than one person is involved in making such decisions. For

example, in some units a standing review committee can

evaluate all candidates who arise in this person-speciﬁc

fashion; others may ﬁnd that it’s better to appoint an ad hoc

review committee composed of individuals well qualiﬁed to

assess the particular candidate’s potential. If the candidate

might be appropriate for a joint appointment with another

unit, it is important to bring that other unit into the process

as early as possible.

In either case, the committee should be consulted about

the potential candidate’s suitability for full consideration by

the unit. This decision would normally be based on some—

but perhaps not a great deal—of information: certainly at

a minimum a CV. The review committee should either be

charged to make the decision about a full review, or should

make a recommendation to another departmental body,

such as an executive committee, for that decision.

Assuming the decision is to move ahead with a full review,

the unit would collect the normal materials for a full dossier

for review (including information about scholarship,

teaching and service, and letters of recommendation). If

there is considerable time pressure, this may happen at

the same time as a visit. However, time pressure is often

detrimental in these processes, and it may beneﬁt all

concerned to schedule a visit only after an initial committee

review and appropriate departmental procedures establish

that a visit is warranted. Communications, in this and other

stages, should always be directly with the candidate (e.g.,

not through partners in the case of a dual career situation).

Engaging the Provost’s Oce (if PFIP) or Dean’s Oce

(if not PFIP)

It is often best to bring these oces (as appropriate) into

the conversation at the very beginning, so they are aware

of the possibility of a request for help in making a person-

speciﬁc hire. Indeed sometimes units are able to work with

these oces to develop a person-speciﬁc hiring strategy in

advance, so there is some assurance of funding at the outset

of the process. In any case, these oces must be contacted

by the time a decision has been made to move ahead with

considering a candidate for a visit. The Dean’s or Provost’s

oce should be informed and engaged with the unit’s

reasoning about the appointment.

Visit Arrangements

Candidates for person-speciﬁc hiring should be brought

into the unit for a visit organized in precisely the same

way as any other candidate to the unit, even if they are

already on campus or in Ann Arbor. The visit should be

announced in the same manner, they should meet the same

people, participate in the same kinds of activities (job talks

publicized in the usual manner and taking place in the usual

location, chalk talks where appropriate, meetings with

students and faculty, tours of the space and campus, meals

with faculty and students, etc.), and be evaluated by the

same processes.

Deliberation Procedures

Ordinarily the same procedures for decision making used for

other faculty searches (e.g., having the “review committee”

make a report, executive committee approval, department

vote, etc.) should be followed.

In any faculty review process, individuals use many dierent

standards in evaluating candidates for positions. In the case

of person-speciﬁc hires, some faculty may be tempted to

suggest particular standards they believe are appropriate

to this kind of consideration but which are not broadly

accepted by the faculty. Therefore, it is important for the

department to have established understanding and norms

about these issues. For example, a unit may be willing to

consider dual career appointments (either for their own

faculty hires or for other units’) because it recognizes both

their importance for faculty recruitment and retention

campus-wide, and that they present unique opportunities

to augment the strengths of the department. If it has been

decided to consider such appointments, then the fact that

“we wouldn’t have searched for someone in this area” is not

germane to appointing the person. Equally, our uncertainty

that “this person might not have risen to the top of a

national pool” cannot be relevant (since it is an uncertainty

that cannot be addressed). Instead, a more appropriate

benchmark may be: does this person meet our standard for

a colleague in the department (someone who would add to

the department in some ways)?

11UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

In the cases of PFIP and postdoc hiring, units may want

to use a dierent standard than for dual career hires, but

the unit should in advance adopt a clear set of criteria

about what that standard is. For example, for junior hires,

the standard in many units is that the candidate seems

likely to be able to meet our criteria for tenure within the

probationary period. In others, explicit comparison with

some known pool of applicants for other positions (as by a

standing committee) may be appropriate. But in general,

wherever the goal is to bring new and diverse capacities

into the department, departments should not rely on

conventional metrics that may not have previously produced

diversity in the past (such as high rates of publication in

mainstream journals—often enabled by high-powered

mentors at prestigious institutions), but instead rely on

metrics that value the capacity to make new and important

contributions.

Negotiating the oer

If the decision by the unit is to extend an oer, the goal is

to hire a colleague who will thrive here. For that reason,

negotiation should aim—like that for all faculty hiring—to

maximize conditions for the individual’s success. It should

also be conducted in a fashion that communicates respect

and consideration for the individual, including attention to

a reasonable timeline similar to that followed in standard

searches (or explicit and regular communication about

causes of any unusual delays). It is critically important

once the decision to make an oer has been made to

communicate frequently with the candidate about the

process of producing the formal oer.

12 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

The search committee, and/or a larger group in the department, should engage in a relatively

extended review of the wider context of the discipline, as well as the department’s own past

history of searching and hiring, before beginning a new search. Some departments or schools

may have good representation of women and minorities, but lack representation of other

groups. In the case of a department or school that has had limited success in any particular

group, the department is more likely to be able to achieve a dierent outcome if it has some

understanding of factors that that may have played a role in limiting its past success.

Creating a large pool of qualiﬁed candidates is the single most important step in conducting a successful search. Search

committee members must take an active role in identifying and recruiting candidates and not leave a stone unturned in seeking

out excellent candidates.

Reviewing the National Pool

• Take steps to identify the national “pools” of qualiﬁed

candidates for the ﬁeld as a whole and for subﬁelds in

which you are considering hiring. Subﬁeld pools are

sometimes quite dierent from overall pools. ADVANCE

Program sta are willing and able to assist you in

identifying ﬁeld and subﬁeld pools.

• Identify any institutions or individuals that are

especially successful at producing doctorates and/or

postdoctorates from groups that are underrepresented

in your department. Recruit actively from those sources

as well.

Reviewing Past Departmental Searches

• Find out how many members of underrepresented

groups in your ﬁeld have applied for past positions in

your department, as a percentage of the total applicant

pool.

• Find out how many members of underrepresented

groups in your ﬁeld have been brought to campus for

interviews in your ﬁeld in previous searches.

• If members of underrepresented groups have been

hired in recent searches, ask the search committees,

the department chair, and the recently hired faculty

themselves how they were successfully recruited.

III. COMMITTEE ACTIVITY BEFORE THE SEARCH BEGINS

13UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

• If members of underrepresented groups in your ﬁeld

have been oered positions but have turned them down,

attempt to ﬁnd out why they have turned them down.

Do recognize that many candidates are less than candid

in talking with colleagues in the same ﬁeld. ADVANCE

does conduct exit interviews with faculty who leave

positions at U-M annually and updates its report of

themes identiﬁed in that report. Since these interviews

are conﬁdential, results speciﬁc to any individual or

ﬁeld cannot be divulged. However, you may ﬁnd the

annual report of campus-wide results will help you

identify relevant issues. Be sure, in any case, to listen for

potential insights into departmental practices that might

have been a factor in candidates’ decisions. Stories that

appear to be highly individualized at ﬁrst may reveal

patterns when considered in the aggregate.

• Find out what has happened to members of

underrepresented groups in your ﬁeld who were not

oered positions in previous searches. Where are they

now? Does it appear that evaluation bias may have

interfered with the assessment of their likely success?

• If no members of underrepresented groups in your ﬁeld

have been oered positions in recent searches, consider

redeﬁning departmental evaluation systems in ways that

might better take strengths of all candidates into account.

Consider, too, whether positions have been deﬁned too

narrowly. If candidates have been ranked on a single list,

consider using multiple ranking criteria in the future.

Initial Discussions of the Search Committee’s

Charge

• Review the charge to the committee, including legal

requirements and documentation (see Appendix 1 for a

sample).

• Identify the tasks to be completed by the committee and

set up a meeting schedule.

• Establish committee expectations regarding

conﬁdentiality and attendance.

• Decide what role, if any, internet searches are to play

in the selection process and determine how equity and

privacy concerns can be addressed if they are used or

considered.

• Determine materials to be submitted by candidates;

with the aim of ensuring that candidates will have the

best opportunity to make a case for what they could

contribute.

• Identify ways in which the committee as a whole will

ensure that armative action is properly addressed and

that diverse candidates are encouraged to apply.

• Verify that its charge includes particular focus on

equitable search practices, and the goal of identifying

outstanding candidates, including outstanding women

and underrepresented minority candidates for the

position.

• Articulate the fact that diversity and excellence are

fully compatible goals and can and should be pursued

simultaneously.

• Identify selection criteria and develop the position

description prior to beginning the search.

• As is consistent with federal armative action

obligations, at the beginning of the search establish

plans to actively recruit women and underrepresented

minorities into the applicant pool if they are otherwise

likely to be underrepresented in the pool.

• Be sure that all members of the search committee

understand the potential role that evaluation bias

could play to produce an unfair and inequitable search

process.

• Review practices that will mitigate the kinds of

evaluation biases that social science research has

demonstrated result in unfair evaluations for women

and minority candidates.

• Charge the search committee with customizing the

candidate evaluation tool for that search (perhaps with

discussion of overall emphases, relative importance of

dierent criteria).

• Have the department or school faculty discuss and

approve the candidate evaluation tool’s list of criteria

before the search starts.

• Include a checklist of responsibilities for search

committee chair and for department chair (including

ensuring the above practices are followed and ensuring

that inappropriate discussions are prevented or

addressed.

• Include discussion of how the plans to represent

the school’s or department’s commitment to and

strategies for hiring and advancing diverse faculty

are integrated into the hiring process. This may be of

particular concern for departments that have few or no

women or underrepresented minority faculty. In these

cases, it is crucial to develop long-term strategies for

recruiting diverse faculty that go well beyond any single

search. For example, the department might consider

inviting women or minority faculty to give talks and

then inviting them to apply for positions the following

year.

• Remind committee members that the ADVANCE

Program is available to consult as questions arise

throughout the search process.

14 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Issues to Cover in the First Search Committee Meeting

I. Introductions

II. Charge (the following provided merely as examples)

a. Review essential characteristics of the position with the expectation that the committee will ﬁne tune the position

description. These might include:

i. Distinguished or promising record of scholarship; success in core academic functions (research and

teaching); need to avoid overreliance of single indicators of excellence

ii. Tenurable at professor level (if applicable)

iii. Strong administrative experience and skills (if applicable)

iv. Commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, core values of the University

v. Ability to mentor diverse students and junior colleagues

b. Set a clear expectation that the committee will cast a broad net for prospective candidates

(national / international search).

c. Detail the required outcome, e.g., “We have been asked to provide our recommendation of a single candidate for

the department to hire” OR “we have been asked to provide a ranked list of the top 2 or 3 candidates for the

department to discuss” OR “We have been asked to recommend an unranked list of 3–4 candidates. Because the

committee is advisory, the candidates recommended to the Dean must be unranked.”

d. The Dean/Department Chair would like recommendations by [date].

III. Staff Support

[Name] has been assigned to provide sta support for the search. She/he has experience stang searches and will provide

a full range of support to help guide the committee through the search process. [Name], who is also a veteran of a number of

searches in our oce, will be assisting [Name] as needed.

IV. Process

a. Outline time frame and frequency of meetings as well as expectations concerning attendance and conﬁdentiality.

b. Discuss what materials will be requested and where they will be kept.

c. Discuss process to be used to set criteria for job posting.

d. Discuss process the committee will use to generate short list/interview/campus visit candidates and campus visit

candidates for approval.

e. Discuss the role that evaluation bias can play in searches, and the speciﬁc steps the committee will take to

mitigate it.

f. Decide what role, if any, internet searches are to play in the selection process and determine how equity and

privacy concerns can be addressed if they are used.

g. Discuss any approvals, such as approval to interview, that the committee must seek before proceeding.

h. Remind committee members that internal candidates, if there are any, should be treated the same as external

candidates.

i. Discuss how the search will be concluded.

Diversity statements.

Along with information on teaching and scholarship, some units at U-M and across the country now ask for a diversity

statement. This is an opportunity for the applicant to discuss their potential for (or record of) contributing to diversity,

equity, and inclusion in higher education. Such a statement could be encouraged, welcomed, or required as part of the formal

application, either as a separate statement or integrated into existing components. Some U-M units requiring such a statement

have reported that excellent candidates with signiﬁcant and broad diversity commitments were identiﬁed and hired, and that

the statement raised awareness among search committee and department as to the impact of the applicant’s work.

If such a statement is to be requested, search committees and departments should discuss in advance the criteria to be used

to evaluate the information. For example, does the candidate show a commitment to teaching and mentoring students from

broadly diverse demographic and social backgrounds? What is the evidence for that commitment? Search committees and

departments should also understand that the candidate’s own identity characteristics (race/ethnicity, gender, etc.) are not

relevant to this assessment and may not be considered in evaluating a candidate’s demonstrated commitment to diversity,

equity, and inclusion.

15UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

IV. RECRUITING ACTIVITIES DURING THE SEARCH

Broadening the Pool

• As noted under “person speciﬁc hiring,” the University

of Michigan’s Provost’s Faculty Initiative Program (PFIP)

provides supplemental resources “to help schools and

colleges and other academic units to hire and retain

faculty with a commitment to diversity, equity, and

inclusion through scholarship, teaching, and/or service;

to assist the dual career partners of tenure track and

tenured faculty; and to respond to unique opportunities.”

This program can help you recruit and retain faculty who

are both excellent and committed to diversity, equity,

and inclusion. Consult the Provost’s oce for further

information:

provost.umich.edu/programs/pfip.html.

• View your committee’s task as including a process of

generating a pool rather than merely tapping it. This

may be accomplished by having committee members

attend presentations at national meetings and develop

a more diverse list of potential future candidates based

on those meetings. Candidates identiﬁed in this way

may be in any ﬁeld, not necessarily the one targeted for a

particular search. In fact, the department may consider

creating a committee to generate exceptional candidates

for targeted recruitment outside of subﬁeld-deﬁned

searches. In addition, the committee may consider issuing

promising candidates invitations to visit U-M informally

to present research before those individuals are ready

for an active search. Cultivating future candidates is an

important activity for the search committee to undertake,

and may require that the search have a longer time

horizon than is typical (one academic year).

• If your department is a signiﬁcant source of qualiﬁed

applicants nationally, consider setting aside the traditional

constraint against “hiring our own.” It may be important,

if your department or related ones at U-M is a signiﬁcant

producer of the pool, to avoid unduly constraining the

search to those trained elsewhere.

• Keep in mind that some highly ranked eminent

universities have only recently begun actively to

produce women and minority PhDs. Therefore, consider

candidates from a wide range of institutions.

• Consider the possibility that individuals, including women

and underrepresented minorities, who have excelled at

their research and teaching in departments less highly

ranked than U-M’s may be under-placed and might thrive

in the University of Michigan research environment.

• Consider reopening or intensifying the search if the pool

of applicants does not include any female or minority

candidates who will be seriously considered by the search

committee.

16 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Using Active Recruiting Practices

• Place announcements using electronic job-posting

services, websites, listservs, journals, and publications,

particularly those targeted at diverse groups such

as minority and women’s caucuses or professional

networks in your discipline. (Several resources are

listed below.)

• Make personal contacts, including women and

minorities, at professional conferences and invite them

to apply.

• Ask faculty and graduate students to help identify

strong candidates, including women and minority

candidates.

• Contact colleagues at other institutions to seek

nominations of students nearing graduation or others

interested in moving laterally, making sure to request

inclusion of minorities and women.

• Identify suitable faculty at other institutions,

particularly women and minority faculty who

may currently be under-placed, and send job

announcements directly to them.

• Contact relevant professional organizations for rosters

listing women and minorities receiving PhDs (or other

relevant degrees) in the academic ﬁeld.

Be aware that most academic ﬁelds have resources—

listservs, email groups, etc.—that can help you identify or

reach qualiﬁed women and minority candidates. Either

seek these out on your own, or request assistance from

advanceprogr[email protected] in identifying them.

Appendix 2 presents a list of active recruiting resources.

How to Avoid Having Active Recruitment Efforts

Backfire

Women and minority faculty candidates, like all candidates,

wish to be evaluated for academic positions on the basis

of their scholarly credentials. They will not appreciate

subtle or overt indications that they are being valued on

other characteristics, such as their gender or race. Women

candidates and candidates of color already realize that

their gender or race may be a factor in your interest in their

candidacy. It is important that contacts with women and

minority candidates for faculty positions focus on their

scholarship, qualiﬁcations, and their potential academic role

in the department.

Conducting a Fair Selection Process

Documenting the Search

Systematic tracking of the committee’s interaction with

applicants is not only helpful to the committee during the

search, but the resulting records may be useful in the future.

• Develop a standard form that summarizes each

candidate’s progress during the search process (e.g.,

nominated, applied, reviewed, failed to meet minimum

qualiﬁcations, shortlisted, interviewed, eliminated, etc.)

• Create a physical and/or electronic ﬁle for each

candidate who meets the objective criteria

established by the committee to hold their materials,

recommendations, interview notes, and records

of communications. (See below for maintaining

appropriate contact with candidates.)

• Provide a secure location for ﬁles to ensure

conﬁdentiality throughout the search, such as a

password-protected website to track candidates, their

status, and associated materials.

• Maintain ocial minutes of search committee meetings.

These can be brief, but they should document general

criteria established by the committee and their decision-

making process.

• Keep copies of letters and advertisements,

especially those eorts made to recruit women and

underrepresented minority candidates.

• Ensure that each applicant receives a Self-Identiﬁcation

Form to be returned to the Oce for Institutional Equity.

(See hr.umich.edu/working-u-m/management-

administration/human-resources-administrative-

forms.) This form oers the applicant the option of

reporting their gender, ethnicity, and race. OIE uses

these data to evaluate the success of the committee’s

eorts to generate a diverse pool. Contact your school

or college for information about how this form should be

distributed.

• Ensure consistency of evaluations, interviews, and

reference checks by developing standard forms and

standard questions for these activities.

• Ensure that documentation provides rationales for

search committee decisions and recommendations.

This can be as extensive as notes to the candidate

ﬁles, or as brief as a line in committee minutes (e.g.,

“The committee decided to limit interviews to those

candidates having more than ten years of teaching

experience”). Notes should indicate speciﬁc job-related

reasons for selection or non-selection.

17UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Communicating Promptly and Courteously with

Candidates

Ongoing communication is vital to the success of the

current search and to future searches. Our treatment of

applicants, even those we do not wish to interview, should

demonstrate the values of the University of Michigan and our

respect for current and potential colleagues. Slow or sloppy

communication can create a negative impression of the

department, school, or University as a whole.

• Respectful communication and complete conﬁdentiality

are very important throughout the search

• Keep all candidates informed in a courteous and timely

manner about the progress of the search

• Craft courteous form letters

• Notify candidates who were eliminated at the outset

of the search because they do not meet minimum

requirements; express appreciation for their interest in

U-M

• Make timely requests to internal and external colleagues

for nominations

• Send thank you messages upon receipt of nominations

• Send communications to nominees encouraging them

to apply (include position description)

• Send timely acknowledgments of receipt of applications

and/or other materials

• Send timely notiﬁcation to candidates who are no longer

being considered; provide feedback on their application,

if appropriate, and thank them for their interest in U-M

• Engage in prompt follow-up with ﬁnalists after campus

visits

• Make timely and courteous requests for references

• Keep the “short list” of candidates up to date on the

status of the search, but they should not be told that

another candidate has been oered the job until the

ﬁnalist has accepted the department’s oer

Reviewing Applications with Objective Criteria

As you begin to evaluate applicants, be aware of conscious

and unconscious biases that may exist, including those below,

which have been identiﬁed by psychological research:

• We often judge people based exclusively on our own

experience.

• We tend to favor people who look like us or have other

experiences like our own.

• We need to consider the experience and needs of our

diverse student population.

• Women and underrepresented minority candidates are

penalized disproportionately if reviewers do not allocate

adequate time (15–20 minutes) to reviewing their ﬁ s.

• Be sure to consider whether you are using evidence to

arrive at your evaluations/ratings.

There is a large body of work on how unconscious biases

inﬂuence judgments when reviewing scientiﬁc work and job

candidates. Examples include:

• The STRIDE Committee’s website is a helpful resource

for PowerPoint slides, resources, and tools:

advance.umich.edu/stride

• “Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women,” a book by

Virginia Valian

• ADVANCE Program sta will be happy to help you obtain

this material (advancepr[email protected]).

By incorporating the qualiﬁcations in the position description

into a standard evaluation form, screening criteria can be

applied consistently to all candidates.

• Determine, prioritize, and document search criteria

based on position duties. Discuss the range of evidence

that will be considered as relevant to each criterion.

• Notice that dierent criteria may produce dierent

top candidates. Be sure to consider all criteria that are

pertinent to the department’s goals (e.g., experience

working with diverse students). In addition, discuss the

relative weight of the dierent criteria, and the likelihood

that no or few candidates will rate high on all of them.

• Identify essential or threshold qualiﬁcations without

which a candidate will not be selected, no matter

how impressive in other areas. Rank other skills or

competencies in order of importance.

• Consider including criteria not directly related to the

speciﬁc discipline, if they are nonetheless important to

the ability to succeed in the job in the department or

college, such as collegiality or an unusual combination of

skills/perspectives.

• Ensure that the criteria for evaluation of candidates do

not preclude people with non-traditional career patterns

(e.g., an engineer who has worked at a national research

laboratory, individuals who have taken family leave, a

ﬁrst- generation scholar who began his or her career

at an institution that was not research-intensive, or

individuals with disabilities whose careers have been

interrupted).

18 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

• Consider highly successful people with transferable skill

sets.

• Develop a mechanism for screening applications

that includes recording why or why not the applicant

was selected. You will need to justify your ﬁnal

ecommendations based upon the position description.

• Using a standard form will keep committee members

focused on the agreed-upon criteria and provide

documentation for the process.

One of the hallmarks of an equitable search is that all

candidates are treated in the same manner. This may include

asking the same questions under the same conditions, and

being evaluated using consistent criteria. It is dicult to

maintain a level playing ﬁeld if the search committee uses

internet searches to gather additional information about the

candidates.

• Some candidates might gain an unfair advantage

because of their positive presence on the web; others

might be disadvantaged by incorrect information.

• Internet searches might also reveal personal details,

such as marital status or age, which should not be

considered by the search committee members. Because

it is dicult to disregard this kind of information once it

enters the review process, it is best to avoid it.

The committee should decide what role, if any, internet

searches are to play in the selection process, and should

ensure that the same standard is applied to all candidates.

In addition, if internet searches are used, candidates should

be provided an opportunity to respond to any information

considered by the committee.

Creating the Short List

The most important general point about the process of

creating the short list is to build in several checkpoints at

which you make a considered decision about whether you are

satisﬁed with the pool of candidates you have generated

• Get consensus on the multiple criteria that will be

used to choose candidates for interviews. Notice that

dierent criteria may produce dierent top candidates.

Be sure to consider all criteria that are pertinent to

the department’s goals (e.g., experience working with

diverse students might be one). In addition, discuss

the relative weighting of the dierent criteria, and the

likelihood that no or few candidates will rate high on all

of them.

• Beware of systems of evaluation that inadvertently

screen out well-qualiﬁed applicants from minority-

serving institutions.

• Be careful to place a suitable value on non-traditional

career paths. Take into account time spent raising

children or getting particular kinds of training, unusual

undergraduate degrees, and dierent job experiences.

There is considerable evidence that evaluations of men

frequently go up when they have such experience, while

evaluations of women with the same kinds of experience

go down.

• Develop a “medium” list from which to generate your

short list. Are there women or minority candidates on it?

If not, consider intensifying the search before moving on

to a short list.

• Consider creating separate short lists ranking people on

dierent criteria, such as teaching, research potential,

collaborative potential, and mentoring capacity. This

helps mitigate the tendency for “halo” eects that

result from reliance on overall impressions rather than

evidence-based judgments of particular criteria. Develop

your ﬁnal shortlist by taking the top candidates across

dierent criteria. Evaluate this step before ﬁnalizing

the list; consider whether evaluation bias may still be

aecting your choices.

• Be sure to consider the experience and needs of our

diverse student population.

• Review the top female and/or minority candidates

in your pool. Consider whether your short list should

be revised because the committee’s judgments

were inﬂuenced by evaluation bias (the tendency to

underestimate women and underrepresented minority

members’ qualiﬁcations and overestimate those of white

males).

• Evaluation bias is minimized if you interview more

than one woman and/or underrepresented minority

candidate. As noted earlier, research indicates that

interviewers evaluate women and underrepresented

minorities more fairly when there is more than one

woman in the interview pool. When there is only one

woman or underrepresented minority, s/he is far less

likely to succeed than women or minorities who are

compared to a diverse pool of candidates, probably

because of the heightened perceived salience of his or

her race or gender.

• Remember that there are many ways to assess a

candidate’s skills (e.g., samples of work, presentation

of research, or a lecture in an undergraduate class)

and each assessment tool produces dierent kinds of

information.

19UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

• If the committee learns of a strong candidate who

is nevertheless not appropriate for the current open

position, the committee should consider forwarding

that information to the department Chair or Dean. The

Provost provides supplemental resources to help the

schools and colleges and other academic units to hire

faculty with a commitment to diversity, equity, and

inclusion through scholarship, teaching, and/or service;

to assist the dual career partners of tenure track and

tenured faculty, and to respond to unique opportunities.

Provost’s Faculty Initiative Program funding may be

available to help units recruit tenure-track faculty apart

from the search at hand.

• Submit a request for approval of interview candidates, if

your department or school/college requires a review of

the committee’s short list at this point.

Inviting Candidates to Interview

Letters and information packages should be prepared in

advance so that the committee can promptly send a complete

invitation package as soon as it decides whom to interview.

It is easier to evaluate an informed candidate than one who

has not been given the opportunity to prepare. Provide

information about the following issues, as appropriate:

• Time, place, and format of the interview. If “hotel”

interviews at conferences are a part of the process,

consider whether the setting (a hotel room) may

make members of some groups (e.g., women) less

comfortable than others. Consider whether this practice

is essential to your process if it likely disadvantages

some groups. Equally, if you use Skype or phone

interviews, consider whether you have found that some

kinds of individuals consistently perform better in that

context and if that dierential performance is job-

relevant.

• Detailed itinerary, including names of interviewers

• Contact information, including cell phone number of

host

• Background on department, school/college, the

University of Michigan, and Ann Arbor

• Travel arrangements and directions to campus

• Information on the location and accessibility of campus

locations relevant to the visit.

• Contacts that a candidate can use if s/he needs

accommodations for a disability

• General information on family-friendly policies, beneﬁts

and dual career services from your school/college and/

or the Provost’s oce.

20 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

With careful planning, a campus visit can

create a positive impression on the candidate

and also provide information to help your

unit make an informed decision.

Planning for Effective Information-Gathering

• Identify all people and groups to be involved in the

interview process and provide them with relevant

information about the position: job description,

essential functions of the position, necessary areas of

inquiry, and standard interview questions.

• Schedule and reserve appropriate spaces for

interviews and communicate those times and places

to interviewers as far in advance as possible. Send

reminders a few days before the event.

• Review the structure of the visit and the interview

process with all interviewers, especially those who

may be conducting individual interviews rather than

meeting with the committee.

• Provide faculty with this section of the faculty hiring

manual to ensure that they have a consistent and

comprehensive understanding of the interview process.

• Provide information about the candidate and his or her

scholarly work to all faculty and encourage them to

read it. Faculty who are prepared ask better questions

and make a better impression on the candidate.

• Ask faculty to provide feedback about speciﬁc facets of

the candidate’s potential, rather than just requesting

generic feedback. Studies show that when people focus

on particular issues of performance, they are much

less likely to rely on implicit or unconscious biases.

• Provide an evaluation sheet or other systematic

feedback mechanisms, and detail how feedback should

be given to the committee or chair.

• Encourage faculty to take notes during the interview

that focus on required skills and relevant applicant

responses.

• Notes can be helpful when reﬂecting on individual

applicants or when discussing them with others who

interviewed the same persons at dierent times.

V. HANDLING CAMPUS VISITS

21UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

• Remind faculty of their responsibility not only to elicit

speciﬁc information from the candidate but also to be

courteous to the candidate and positive about U-M.

• Be explicit about conﬁdentiality expectations.

• Require interviewers to understand what questions

should not be asked of candidates (see p 8). This

will help ensure that interviews are conducted

appropriately.

• Remember that the candidate should do the majority

of the talking during an interview.

• Consider asking each candidate to present a paper, to

lead a colloquium, teach a class, or meet with graduate

students while on campus for the interview. If they

conduct any of these activities, arrange for feedback to

the committee about their performance.

Making a Good Impression

• Remind participants that the campus visit is an

important opportunity for the department to

communicate three messages:

o You are seriously interested in the candidate’s

scholarly credentials and work, as well as other

evidence of their excellence and creativity.

o Michigan is a good place to work, because it is

intellectually lively and committed to diversity in

its leadership, faculty, sta and student body.

o Michigan is a good place to work, because it has a

variety of humane, family-friendly policies in place.

How these messages are communicated can make a critical

dierence in recruiting individuals to campus. They may

be especially important in recruiting women or minority

candidates to departments in which they will be vastly

outnumbered by male or majority colleagues.

• Make it clear that you are interested in the candidate’s

scholarship and skills, rather than his or her

demographic characteristics. It is not helpful to make a

point with candidates that the department is eager to

hire women and minorities.

• Consider how the department will represent the

University as a whole as a place in which women and

minority faculty can thrive.

• Consider how the department will represent itself as a

place in which women and minority faculty can thrive.

This may be dicult for departments that currently

have few or no women and minority faculty members.

Some things that may make the department more

attractive to women and underrepresented minorities

are:

o Clear and public policies and procedures for

evaluation and promotion

o Mentoring resources for junior faculty in general

and female and underrepresented minority

faculty in particular

o Development of some practices in evaluation and

annual reporting that value mentoring of women

and minority faculty and students

• Schedule interviews and events with consistency in

achieving outcomes, recognizing that dierent means

may be required. For example, white male candidates

may automatically be meeting with white male faculty,

given the composition of your department. When

recruiting candidates with dierent race and/or gender

characteristics, it will be equally important for them

to meet diverse students and faculty. Race/ethnicity

and gender are not the only personal characteristics

that may be important to consider; if a candidate

mentions that s/he is particularly concerned with the

availability of a community identiﬁed with a particular

nationality, religion, family status, sexual identity, or

other characteristic, take steps to help them meet with

appropriate members of that community. One option

is to create opportunities for the candidate to meet

with faculty members outside the evaluation process,

including members of STRIDE, who can provide

relevant information to candidates.

• Give the candidate a chance to interact with the

department’s faculty in multiple venues. Formal talks

may not reveal every candidate’s strengths. Consider

including Q + A sessions, “chalk talks,” and other less

formal interactions.

• Be sure to oer information and access to faculty who

might represent opportunities for interdisciplinary

collaboration.

• Avoid leaving candidates alone with faculty who may

be hostile to hiring women and underrepresented

minorities. If a candidate is confronted with racist,

sexist, or homophobic remarks, take positive and

assertive steps to defuse the situation. Be sure there

is a practice in place in the department for dealing

with the expression of racist, sexist, or homophobic

attitudes, and that the candidate is made aware of it, if

the situation arises.

• Be sure to gather equivalent information from all

candidates, so you will be able to evaluate them all in

terms of the same criteria. This does not require use of

uniform questions with all candidates, but does require

care in obtaining comparable information.

22 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

• Introduce women and minority members of the

department to all candidates, not just women and

minorities. Moreover, if women and minority faculty

members are expected to play an especially active

role in recruiting new faculty, be sure to recognize this

additional service burden in their overall service load.

• Inform candidates before scheduling the interview

what expenses will and will not be reimbursed, what

receipts are needed, and how to ﬁll out expense forms.

Reimburse him or her as soon as possible.

• First impressions are important.

o Provide transportation to and from the airport

and the hotel.

o If the candidate arrives the evening before the

interview, be sure a search committee member

or other faculty member is available to take the

candidate to dinner and/or other activities.

o These arrangements should be comparable for all

candidates.

• Consider appointing a host for the visit who takes

responsibility for all aspects of the visit. That person

should assign a search committee member or

sta member to escort the candidate to and from

interviews.

• Do not schedule the candidate’s interview day so

tightly that there is no time for breaks. Candidates

should be given windows between appointments to

take care of personal and professional business and to

gather their thoughts.

• Be sure that departmental sta know that candidates

will be visiting so that they can greet visitors

appropriately.

• Plan schedules that are similar in format to ensure an

equitable basis for evaluation. Internal and external

candidates should be given equal opportunity to

interact with campus colleagues.

• Mention to all candidates that the University oers

reasonable accommodations to persons with

disabilities. The following language may be used:

o The University provides reasonable

accommodations for persons with disabilities,

both in the interview process and for its

faculty, students and sta. Should you need

an accommodation, please let us know at your

earliest convenience so that we may make

arrangements in advance of your interview. Please

contact [person] at [phone number] or [email]

with any request you may have.

o If a candidate requests an accommodation and

the department does not know how to meet

the accommodation request or has concerns

about the request, please contact the Oce

for Institutional Equity at 734/763-0235(v) or

734/647-1388 (tty), or Institutional.Equity@

umich.edu for assistance.

• Consider providing a guided tour of campus and

showcase the community; discuss the positive aspects

of working and living in Ann Arbor and the surrounding

communities.

• Provide all candidates with information such as:

o The link to the University’s “Working at U-M”

website: hr.umich.edu/working-u-m

o Information for LGBTQ faculty, students, and sta:

https://spectrumcenter.umich.edu/

o The link to the University’s Veteran and Military

Services Program website: vets.umich.edu

o The link to the U-M Council for Disability

Concerns: ability.umich.edu

o Information about the diverse employment

possibilities that partners might ﬁnd not only

at the University (careers.umich.edu), but at

other institutions of higher learning in Michigan

(miherc.org) and throughout Ann Arbor and the

larger Southeast Michigan area.

o Dual career services brochures from your college

or the Provost’s oce as well as a link to the

University’s website on dual career resources:

provost.umich.edu/faculty/family/dual-career

o Information about fun University or Ann Arbor

events, such as Top of the Park, The University

Musical Society, the Uniquely Michigan website

(hr.umich.edu/benefits-wellness/community-

perks/uniquely-michigan) and information

about recreational activities.

o Information about beneﬁts oered by the

University, including medical and retirement

beneﬁts. Information is available at the Beneﬁts

website: hr.umich.edu/benefits-wellness.

23UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

• Openly discuss standards of creative and scholarly

productivity and research with all candidates.

• Decide whether the search would be enhanced by a

meeting with the Associate Dean, Dean, or Provost. If

so, prepare them in advance by sharing the candidates’

CVs.

• Demonstrate a commitment to teaching by including

students in the schedule and/or a commitment

to interdisciplinary and interdivisional activity by

scheduling interviews with colleagues in other

departments and divisions, if appropriate.

• Allow time at the end of the visit for a private meeting

between the candidate and the chair of the search

committee or department. Use this opportunity to

learn what questions remain, whether the candidate

has questions about the position, and what may be

obstacles to their accepting it.

• Conﬁrm the candidate has been given copies of the

University’s “family-friendly” policies (dual career,

maternity leave, modiﬁed duties, etc.), regardless of

gender, partner or parent status, or race or ethnicity.

Some information is available on the Work Life

Resource Center’s website: https://hr.umich.edu/

benefits-wellness/family/work-life-resource-

center.

• Remind interviewers that all the time spent with an

applicant, including social functions and meals, is

considered part of the interview process. Anyone who

meets with the candidate in a social context should

avoid conversation that touches on inappropriate

topics or inquiries that are illegal in an interview

context. Such discussion could be misinterpreted by

the candidate at the time or subsequently.

• Make a good last impression. The last point of contact

—e.g., the person conducting the last interview

or taking the candidate to the airport —should be

someone with a positive attitude toward the candidate,

the department, and the University.

• Under no circumstances should a candidate be told

that the position has already been oered to another

individual, nor should it ever be suggested that one

or more candidates is being interviewed for reasons

unrelated to the designated qualiﬁcations for the

position.

Making the Final Decision or Recommendation

• Consider only the candidate’s ability to perform

the essential functions of the job and avoid making

assumptions based on perceived race, ethnic

background, religion, marital or familial status, age,

disability, sexual orientation, or veteran status.

• Ask faculty to provide feedback about speciﬁc facets of

the candidate’s potential, rather than just requesting

generic feedback. Studies show that when people

focus on particular issues of performance, they are

much less likely to rely on implicit biases. A sample

evaluation form follows; it can be modiﬁed to represent

the key criteria for your search. It is also available at

http://advance.umich.edu/resources/.

• Ensure that the ﬁnal discussion of the candidates

remains focused on the search criteria and evidence

about the qualiﬁcations of the candidates for the

position. Do not engage in or permit others to engage

in discussion of personal characteristics that are not

job-relevant, or global evaluations unsupported by

speciﬁc evidence.

• Often providing an unranked list of acceptable

candidates to the chair or Dean, or the department,

allows more diverse candidates to remain in

consideration at the last stage. Sometimes more than

one candidate can be considered for a ﬁnal oer.

24 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Candidate Evaluation Template

The following oers a method for department faculty to provide evaluations of job candidates. It is meant to be a template for departments that

they can modify as necessary for their own uses. The proposed questions are designed for junior faculty candidates; however, alternate language is

suggested in parentheses for senior faculty candidates.

Candidate’s Name:

Please indicate which of the following are true for you (check all that apply):

Read candidate’s CV and statements

(e.g. teaching, diversity)

Read candidate’s scholarship

Read candidate’s letters of

recommendation

Attended candidate’s job talk

Met with candidate

Attended lunch or dinner with

candidate

Other (please explain):

Please comment on the candidate’s scholarship as reﬂected in the job talk:

Please comment on the candidate’s teaching ability as reﬂected in the job talk:

Please rate the candidate on each of the following:

Potential for (evidence of) scholarly impact in the classroom

Potential for (evidence of) research productivity

Potential for (evidence of) research funding

Potential for (evidence of) collaboration

Potential for (evidence of) contribution to department’s priorities

Ability to make positive contribution to department’s climate

Potential (demonstrated ability) to attract and supervise diverse graduate students

Potential (demonstrated ability) to teach and supervise diverse undergraduates

Potential (demonstrated ability) to be a conscientious university community member

Other comments?

excellent

good

neutral

fair

poor

unable to judge

25UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

While the committee may feel they are

moving quickly as they debate and decide

on ﬁnal recommendations and conduct

reference and credential checks, the ﬁnalists

will be acutely aware of any delays in

communication. The committee chair or his

or her designee should be responsible for

staying in touch with ﬁnalists, if only to report

after no decision has been made.

• The “short list” of candidates should be kept up to date

on the status of the search but should not be told that

another candidate has been oered the job until the

ﬁnalist has accepted the department’s oer.

• If a candidate has been completely eliminated with no

possibility of being reconsidered, let them know with a

personal letter or phone call that includes appreciation

of their talents and their interest in the University of

Michigan.

• If there is any doubt about the appropriateness of

eliminating and contacting selected candidates,

consult with the Oce for Institutional Equity or the

Oce of the General Counsel.

• The way an oer is negotiated can have a huge impact

not only on the immediate hiring outcome, but also

on a new hire’s future career. Candidates who feel

that University representatives (committee chairs,

department chairs, deans, etc.) conduct negotiations

honestly and openly, and aim to create circumstances

in which they will thrive, are more satisﬁed in their

positions and more likely to stay at the U-M than

are those who feel that a department or chair has

deliberately withheld information, resources, or

opportunities from them. Initial equity in both the

negotiated conditions and in the department’s follow-

through on the commitments it makes are important

factors in retention as well as recruitment.

VI. FINAL STAGES OF THE SEARCH PROCESS: NEGOTIATING THE OFFER

26 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

• Some candidates may have received less mentoring

at previous career stages than their counterparts,

and may therefore be at a disadvantage in knowing

what they can legitimately request in negotiations. In

addition, there is some evidence that women are less

inclined to negotiate for themselves than men are, and

that when they do they are viewed dierently. To ensure

equity, aim to empower the candidate to advocate on

his or her own behalf, by providing all candidates with

a complete list of things it would be possible for them

to discuss in the course of negotiations. This list will

vary by ﬁeld, and should include those items that will

maximize the likelihood of candidate success in that

ﬁeld. For some ﬁelds these might include:

o Salary

o Beneﬁts

o Course release time

o Lab equipment

o Lab space

o Renovation of lab space

o Research assistant

o Clerical / administrative support

o Attractive teaching opportunity

o Travel funds

o Discretionary Funds

o Summer salary

o Moving expenses

o Assistance with partner/spouse position

o Other issues of concern to the candidate

• Consider appointing a negotiation facilitator—

which may be the search committee chair— to

help the candidate throughout the negotiation

process. This person should be speciﬁcally

charged with assisting the candidate in

articulating her/his needs and desires to the chair

or dean, and providing information about the

University context, not with actually negotiating

the oer.

27UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

VII. GETTING OFF TO A GOOD START

• • Be sure to provide clear, detailed, written

information about mentoring practices as well as all

crucial review criteria and milestones such as annual

reviews, third-year reviews, tenure reviews, and post-

tenure promotion reviews.

• If a candidate has been selected for appointment

and has a partner who will need placement help, the

department chair should ensure that the couple is

referred for dual career services.

• See The Importance of Dual Career Considerations

within Section II, and be familiar with University

resources to support these eorts. Consult the

Provost’s oce for further information.

•• If the department hires a strong woman and/or minority

candidate, consider the factors that may have enabled

it to do so and keep a record of good practices and

successful searches for future reference.

• If the applicant pool was not as large, as qualiﬁed,

or as diverse as was anticipated, consider:

o Could the job description have been constructed in

a way that would have brought in a broader pool of

candidates?

o Could the department have recruited more actively?

o Were there criteria for this position that were

consistently not met by women or candidates of

color? Where they relevant to the job description?

• If women and/or minority candidates were oered

positions that they chose not to accept, what reasons did

they oer? Consider as many factors as you can identify.

Are there things that the department could do to make

itself more attractive to such candidates in the future?

Be sure that any analysis and insight is shared with

departmental decision-makers and is part of the process

of initiating future searches.

VIII. EVALUATING THE SEARCH

28 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

M E M O R A N D U M

TO:

FROM: [Dean or Department Chair]

RE: Search for

DATE:

I am inviting you to become a member of the advisory committee to search for [describe the

position] in the department/school/college of .

The advisory committee is charged with ﬁnding and recruiting the very best candidate to ﬁll this

position. It is an important task, since we have high expectations about what this new faculty

colleague could bring to the position and our community. [Insert here the preliminary position

description and the job requirements, e.g. “We are seeking an assistant professor in the ﬁeld of X

with particular expertise in the areas of Y and Z.”]

[If appropriate use this paragraph to describe any additional goals of the search, e.g., acquire

expertise in an emerging ﬁeld, increase opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, shore up

an area recently weakened by attrition.]

[Name]

has agreed to chair the search committee, with

[Name]

and

[Name]

providing committee support.

The University is committed to creating an environment that is welcoming, inclusive, and

supportive for all members of our community. As a search committee member, you will play a

critical role in ensuring that the search reﬂects these values. Please familiarize yourself with the

attached search manual, which clearly explains how to meet the University’s equal opportunity

and armative action obligations by conducting a fair, open, and equitable search. [Mention any

additional materials that have been compiled for the committee, for example, timeline or reference

material.]

I am asking that the advisory committee complete its search by [date] , at which

time I will ask for [specify the expected outcome, for example an unranked list of three to four

candidates that the committee recommends for the position]. I will then meet with the committee

to hear your views on the strengths and weaknesses of the ﬁnal candidates.

I appreciate your willingness to provide this important service to [our department/school].

cc: Search Chair

APPENDIX 1: SAMPLE SEARCH COMMITTEE CHARGE

29UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Be aware that most ﬁelds also have resources—listservs,

email groups, etc.—that can help you identify or reach

qualiﬁed women and minority candidates in particular. Either

seek these out on your own, or request assistance from

[email protected] in identifying them. Some fairly broad

listings are included here.

“Guidelines for Recruiting a Diverse Workforce.” Penn State

University. Available online:

psu.edu/dept/aaoffice/pdf/guidelines.pdf

“Faculty Recruitment Toolkit.” University of Washington.

Available online:

washington.edu/diversity/faculty-advancement/

handbook

“Recruitment and Selection of Faculty and Academic

Professional and Administrative Employees Appendix A:

Recruiting a Diverse Qualiﬁed Pool of Applicants” University of

Minnesota.

policy.umn.edu/hr/recruitfacpa-appa

“Equity and Diversity in the Search Process Toolkit.” University

of Minnesota.

https://diversity.umn.edu/eoaa/searchprocesstoolkit

“Massachusetts Institute of Technology Faculty Search

Committee Handbook.” (2002).

http://facultygovernance.mit.edu/reports/mit-faculty-

search-committee-handbook

“Search Committee Toolkit.” University of California at Los

Angeles.

https://ucla.box.com/s/

l4adttwi8hk6xb77zfc8vb24tw04bdt7

“Searching for Excellence and Diversity: A Guide for Search

Committee Chairs.” Case Western Reserve University.

https://wiseli.engr.wisc.edu/docs/SearchBook_Wisc.pdf

“Recruitment and Retention: Guidelines for Chairs.” (updated

2007). Hunter College, CUNY.

hunter.cuny.edu/genderequity/repository/files/equity-

materials/recruitretain.515.pdf

The CIC Directory compiles listings of women and minority

Ph.D. recipients, accessible with a U-M account.

apps.cic.net/CICDirectory

The Minority and Women Doctoral Directory “is a registry

which maintains up-to-date information on employment

candidates who have recently received, or are soon to

receive, a Doctoral or Master’s degree in their respective

ﬁeld from one of approximately two hundred major research

universities in the United States. The current edition of

the directory lists approximately 4,500 Black, Hispanic,

American Indian, Asian American, and women graduate

students in nearly 80 ﬁelds in the sciences, engineering,

the social sciences, and the humanities.” Directories are

available for purchase from [email protected]

National Science Foundation Survey of Earned Doctorates

is published yearly. While it does not list individual doctoral

recipients, it is a good resource for determining how big the

pool of new women and minority scholars will be in various

ﬁelds.

nsf.gov/statistics/srvydoctorates

Ford Foundation Fellows is an on-line directory of minority

PhDs in all ﬁelds, administered by the National Research

Council (NRC). The directory contains information on Ford

Foundation Postdoctoral fellowship recipients awarded since

1980 and Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Dissertation

fellowship recipients awarded since 1986. This database does

not include Ford Fellows whose fellowships were administered

by an institution or agency other than the NRC.

nrc58.nas.edu/FordFellowDirect/Main/Directory.aspx

Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program provides an

online list of minority PhDs and their dissertation, book, and

article titles in all ﬁelds upon request.

mmuf.org

APPENDIX 2: ACTIVE RECRUITING RESOURCES

30 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

The Faculty for The Future Project is administered by

WEPAN (The Women in Engineering Program and Advocates

Network), and oers a free forum for students to post

resumes and search for positions and for employers to post

positions and search for candidates. The website focuses on

linking women and underrepresented minority candidates

from engineering, science, and business with faculty and

research positions at universities.

https://www.wepan.org/

IMDiversity.com is dedicated to providing career and

self-development information to all minorities, speciﬁcally

African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans,

Native Americans and women. It maintains a large database

of available jobs, candidate resumes, and information on

workplace diversity.

imdiversity.com

Nemnet is a national minority recruitment ﬁrm committed

to helping schools and organizations in the identiﬁcation

and recruitment of minority candidates. Since 1994 it has

worked with over 200 schools, colleges and universities,

and organizations. It posts academic jobs on its website and

gathers vitae from students and professionals of color.

nemnet.com

HBCU Connect.com Career Center is a job posting and

recruitment site speciﬁcally for students and alumni of

historically black colleges and universities.

jobs.hbcuconnect.com

Society of Women Engineers maintains an online career fair.

swe.org

Association for Women in Science maintains a job listings

page.

awis.org

American Indian Science & Engineering Society maintains a

job listings page (and a resume database available to Career

Fair exhibitors).

aises.org

American Indian Graduate Center hosts a professional

organization, fellowship and postdoctoral listings, and a

magazine in which job postings can be advertised.

aigcs.org

National Society of Black Engineers seeks increase the

number of minority students studying engineering at both the

undergraduate and graduate levels. It encourages members

to seek advanced degrees in engineering or related ﬁ and to

obtain professional engineering registrations.

nsbe.org

Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers is a leading social-

technical organization whose primary function is to enhance

and achieve the potential of Hispanics in engineering, math

and science.

shpe.org

APS is committed to the inclusion of underrepresented

minorities in physics and has spent decades working on

programs to increase recruitment and retention of African

American, Hispanic American, and Native American

physicists.

aps.org/programs/roster/index.cfm

Recruitment Sources page at Rutgers lists several resources

that can be helpful in recruiting women and minority

candidates.

uhr.rutgers.edu/uhr-units-offices/consulting-staffing-

compensation/hiring-toolkit/hiring-and-recruitment-

resources

Faculty Diversity Oce page at Case Western Reserve

University provides links to many speciﬁc professional

organizations and diversity resources for faculty searches.

https://case.edu/diversity/office-for-faculty-diversity/

resources-for-new-faculty

The CIC Doctoral Directory is a listing of doctoral degree

recipients who are members of groups underrepresented in

higher education and who are alumni of the universities of

the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. The Directory

is designed to increase the visibility of doctoral alumni

who bring diverse perspectives and experiences to higher

education. The Directory will be promoted among hiring

committees at CIC member universities, and the searchable,

online database will be freely available to the public.

https://www.btaa.org/resources-for/students/doctoral-

directory/the-doctoral-directory

31UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

1. What is the nature of the problem?—General analysis

Aronson, J., Lustina, M. J., Good, C., Keough,

K., Steele, C. M., & Brown, J. (1999). When white

men can’t do math: Necessary and sucient factors in

stereotype threat. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,

35(1), 29–46.

Research on ‘‘stereotype threat’’ (Aronson, Quinn, &

Spencer, 1998; Steele, 1997; Steele &Aronson, 1995)

suggests that the social stigma of intellectual inferiority

borne by certain cultural minorities can undermine the

standardized test performance and school outcomes

of members of these groups. This research tested two

assumptions about the necessary conditions for stereotype

threat to impair intellectual test performance. First, we

tested the hypothesis that to interfere with performance,

stereotype threat requires neither a history of stigmatization

nor internalized feelings of intellectual inferiority, but

can arise and become disruptive as a result of situational

pressures alone. Two experiments tested this notion with

participants for whom no stereotype of low ability exists in

the domain we tested and who, in fact, were selected for

high ability in that domain (math-proﬁcient white males).

In Study 1 we induced stereotype threat by invoking a

comparison with a minority group stereotyped to excel at

math (Asians). As predicted, these stereotype-threatened

white males performed worse on a dicult math test than a

nonstereotype-threatened control group. Study 2 replicated

this eect and further tested the assumption that those that

have been attributed to genetically rooted sex dierences.

Berdahl, J. L., & Min, J.-A. (2012). Prescriptive

stereotypes and workplace consequences for East Asians

in North America. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority

Psychology, 18(2), 141–152.

We pursue the idea that racial stereotypes are not only

descriptive, reﬂecting beliefs about how racial groups actually

dier, but are prescriptive as well, reﬂecting beliefs about

how racial groups should dier. Drawing on an analysis

of the historic and current status of East Asians in North

America, we study descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes

of East Asians along the dimensions of competence, warmth,

and dominance and examine workplace consequences

of violating these stereotypes. Study 1 shows that East

Asians are descriptively stereotyped as more competent,

less warm, and less dominant than Whites. Study 2 shows

that only the descriptive stereotype of East Asians as less

dominant than Whites is also a prescriptive stereotype. Study

3 reveals that people dislike a dominant East Asian coworker

compared to a nondominant East Asian or a dominant or

a nondominant White coworker. Study 4 shows that East

Asians who are dominant or warm are racially harassed at

work more than nondominant East Asians and than dominant

and nondominant employees of other racial identities.

Implications for research and theory are discussed.

Chesler, M. A., & Young, A. A. (2013). Faculty

identities and the challenge of diversity: reﬂections on teaching

in higher education. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

This book examines the undergraduate teaching

experiences and collegial relationships of university faculty

who hold appointments in social science, humanities, or

natural science and engineering, and who have received

undergraduate teaching or service-to-diversity nominations

and awards. Documenting and interpreting faculty

members’ social identities and pedagogical practices, this

book explores how professors address the diverse racial,

ethnic, gender, and sexual identities of their students.

Chesler, M., & Young Jr., A. A. (2007). Faculty

members’ social identities and classroom authority. New

directions for teaching and learning, 2007(111), 11–19.

How do faculty members’ social group identities inﬂuence

their choices about how they present themselves and their

course materials? How do these identities aect student

responses to them and the material they present?

Dennehy, T. C., & Dasgupta, N. (2017). Female

peer mentors early in college increase women’s positive

academic experiences and retention in engineering.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(23),

5964–5969.cA

Scientiﬁc and engineering innovation is vital for American

competitiveness, quality of life, and national security.

However, too few American students, especially women,

pursue these ﬁelds. Although this problem has attracted

enormous attention, rigorously tested interventions outside

artiﬁcial laboratory settings are quite rare. To address this gap,

we conducted a longitudinal ﬁeld experiment investigating

the eect of peer mentoring on women’s experiences and

retention in engineering during college transition, assessing

its impact for 1 y while mentoring was active, and an

additional 1 y after mentoring had ended. Incoming women

engineering students (n = 150) were randomly assigned to

female or male peer mentors or no mentors for 1 y.

APPENDIX 3: READING LISTS

32 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (1998). On the

nature of contemporary prejudice: The causes, consequences,

and challenges of aversive racism. In J. Eberhardt & S. T. Fiske

(Eds.), Confronting racism: The problem and the response (pp.

3–32). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

This chapter examines one factor that contributes to the

current frustrations of black Americans: the operation of a

subtle form of racism among individuals that is less overt

but just as insidious as old-fashioned racism.

Ely, R. J., & Thomas, D., A. (2001). Cultural

diversity at work: The eects of diversity perspectives on

work group processes and outcomes. Administrative Science

Quarterly, 46(2), 229–273.

This paper develops theory about the conditions under

which cultural diversity enhances or detracts from work

group functioning. From qualitative research in three

culturally diverse organizations, we identiﬁed three dierent

perspectives on workforce diversity: the integration-and-

learning perspective, the access-and-legitimacy perspective,

and the discrimination-and-fairness perspective. The

perspective on diversity a work group held inﬂuenced how

people expressed and managed tensions related to diversity,

whether those who had been traditionally underrepresented

in the organization felt respected and valued by their

colleagues, and how people interpreted the meaning of their

racial identity at work. These, in turn, had implications for how

well the work group and its members functioned. All three

perspectives on diversity had been successful in motivating

managers to diversify their stas, but only the integration-

and-learning perspective provided the rationale and guidance

needed to achieve sustained beneﬁts from diversity. By

identifying the conditions that intervene between the

demographic composition of a work group and its functioning,

our research helps to explain mixed results on the relationship

between cultural diversity and work group outcomes.

Fiske, S. T. (2002). What we know about bias and

intergroup conﬂict, the problem of the century. Current

Directions in Psychological Science, 11(4), 123–128.

Discusses what psychologists, after years of study, now

know about intergroup bias and conﬂict. It is stated that

most people reveal unconscious, subtle biases, which

are relatively automatic, cool, indirect, ambiguous, and

ambivalent. Subtle biases underlie ordinary discrimination:

comfort with one’s own in-group, plus exclusion and

avoidance of out-groups. Such biases result from internal

conﬂict between cultural ideals and cultural biases. On the

other hand, a small minority of people, extremists, do harbor

blatant biases that are more conscious, hot, direct, and

unambiguous. Blatant biases underlie aggression, including

hate crimes. Such biases result from perceived intergroup

conﬂict over economics and values, in a world perceived to

be hierarchical and dangerous. Reduction of both subtle and

blatant bias results from education, economic opportunity,

and constructive intergroup contact. (PsycINFO Database

Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., Glick, P., & Xu, J.

(2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content:

Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived

status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology, 82(6), 878–902.

This article presents results of research proceeding from

the theoretical assumption that status is associated with

high ratings of competence, while competition is related to

low ratings of warmth. Included in the article are ratings of

various ethnic and gender groups as a function of ratings

of competence and warmth. These illustrate the average

content of the stereotypes held about these groups in terms

of the dimensions of competence and warmth, which are

often key elements of evaluation.

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.

The authors analyzed national survey data as well as

annual faculty performance reporting system data from

a Midwestern university. They ﬁnd that women faculty

perform more service than male faculty, even after

controlling for rank, race/ethnicity, and ﬁeld of study or

department, and that this dierence is driven by internal

(rather than external) service.

Gutiérrez y Muhs, G., Niemann, Y. F., González,

C. G., & Harris, A. P. (Eds.). (2012). Presumed

incompetent: The intersections of race and class for women

in academia. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.

This book is an account of the intersecting roles of race,

gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty

of color. Through personal narratives and qualitative

empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the

daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as

they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education,

including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with

students, colleagues, and administrators.

33UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and

choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist,

58(9), 697–720.

Early studies of intuitive judgment and decision making

conducted with the late Amos Tversky are reviewed in the

context of two related concepts: an analysis of accessibility,

the ease with which thoughts come to mind; a distinction

between eortless intuition and deliberate reasoning. Intuitive

thoughts, like percepts, are highly accessible. Determinants

and consequences of accessibility help explain the central

results of prospect theory, framing eects, the heuristic

process of attribute substitution, and the characteristic

biases that result from the substitution of nonextensional for

extensional attributes. Variations in the accessibility of rules

explain the occasional corrections of intuitive judgments. The

study of biases is compatible with a view of intuitive thinking

and decision making as generally skilled and successful.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New

York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in

Economics, Kahneman explains the two systems that drive

the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional;

System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.

The impact of overconﬁdence on corporate strategies, the

diculties of predicting what will make us happy in the

future, the profound eect of cognitive biases on everything

from playing the stock market to planning our next

vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing

how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.

Kang, S. K., DeCelles, K. A., Tilcsik, A., &

Jun, S. (2016). Whitened Résumés: Race and Self-

Presentation in the Labor Market. Administrative Science

Quarterly, 61(3), 469–502.

Using interviews, a laboratory experiment, and a resume

audit study, we examine racial minorities’ attempts to avoid

anticipated discrimination in labor markets by concealing

or downplaying racial cues in job applications, a practice

known as ‘‘resume whitening.’’ Interviews with racial minority

university students reveal that while some minority job

seekers reject this practice, others view it as essential and use

a variety of whitening techniques. Building on the qualitative

ﬁndings, we conduct a lab study to examine how racial

minority job seekers change their resumes in response to

dierent job postings. Results show that when targeting an

employer that presents itself as valuing diversity, minority job

applicants engage in relatively little resume whitening and

thus submit more racially transparent resumes. Yet our audit

study of how employers respond to whitened and unwhitened

resumes shows that organizational diversity statements are

not actually associated with reduced discrimination against

unwhitened resumes. Taken together, these ﬁndings suggest

a paradox: minorities may be particularly likely to experience

disadvantage when they apply to ostensibly pro-diversity

employers. These ﬁndings illuminate the role of racial

concealment and transparency in modern labor markets and

point to an important interplay between the self-presentation

of employers and the self-presentation of job seekers in

shaping economic inequality.

Katznelson, I. (2006). When Armative Action Was

White. Poverty and Race Research Action Council, 15(2).

This article proposes that many federal programs can be

best understood as “armative action for whites” both

because in some cases substantial numbers of other groups

were excluded from beneﬁting from them, or because the

primary beneﬁciaries were whites. It states the rationale for

contemporary armative action as “corrective action” for

these exclusionary policies and programs.

Klein, K. J., & Harrison, D. A. (2007). On the

diversity of diversity: Tidy logic, messier realities. Academy

of Management Perspectives, 21(4), 26–33.

This article brieﬂy reviews the arguments presented in

Scott Page’s article “Making the Dierence: Applying

a Logic of Diversity” before plumbing the assumptions

that underlie his case. It challenges several of these

assumptions suggesting that the nature and eects of

diversity in organizations are more complex and less

predictable than he suggests. It then outlines an alternative

conceptualization of the nature and eects of diversity in

organizations, and concludes by proposing a set of practical

suggestions that may indeed allow organizations to realize

the beneﬁts of diversity that Page calls for.

Merton, R. K. (1948). The Self-Fulﬁlling Prophecy.

Antioch Review, 8, 193–210.

The self-fulﬁlling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false

deﬁnition of the situation evoking a new behaviour which

makes the original false conception come true. This

specious validity of the self-fulﬁlling prophecy perpetuates

a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of

events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.

Oreopoulos, P. (2011). Why do skilled immigrants

struggle in the Labor market? A ﬁeld experiment with

thirteen thousand resumes. American Economic Journal:

Economic Policy, 3(4), 148–171.

Thousands of randomly manipulated resumes were sent

in response to online job postings in Toronto to investigate

why immigrants, allowed in based on skill, struggle in the

labor market. The study ﬁnds substantial discrimination

34 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

across a variety of occupations towards applicants with

foreign experience or those with Indian, Pakistani, Chinese,

and Greek names compared with English names. Listing

language ﬂuency, multinational ﬁrm experience, education

from highly selective schools, or active extracurricular

activities had no diminishing eect. Recruiters justify this

behavior based on language skill concerns but fail to fully

account for osetting features when listed.

Page, S. E. (2007). Making the dierence: Applying a

logic of diversity. Academy of Management Perspectives, 21,

6–20.

This article explains why corporate spending of billions of

dollars on diversity training, education, and outreach makes

good business sense and why organizations with diverse

employees often perform best. This is done by describing

a logic of diversity that relies on simple frameworks. Within

these frameworks, it is demonstrated how collections of

individuals with diverse tools can outperform collections of

high “ability” individuals at problem solving and predictive

tasks. In problem solving, these beneﬁts come not through

portfolio eects but from superadditivity: Combinations

of tools can be more powerful than the tools themselves.

In predictive tasks, diversity in predictive models reduces

collective error. Page shows that diversity matters just as

much as highly accurate models when making collective

predictions. This logic of diversity provides a foundation on

which to construct practices that leverage dierences to

improve performance.

Rosette, A. S., Leonardelli, G. J., Phillips, K.

W. (2008). The White standard: Racial bias in leader

categorization. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(4),

758–776.

In 4 experiments, the authors investigated whether race is

perceived to be part of the business leader prototype and,

if so, whether it could explain dierences in evaluations of

White and non-White leaders. The ﬁrst 2 studies revealed that

“being White” is perceived to be an attribute of the business

leader prototype, where participants assumed that business

leaders more than nonleaders were White, and this inference

occurred regardless of base rates about the organization’s

racial composition (Study 1), the racial composition of

organizational roles, the business industry, and the types of

racial minority groups in the organization (Study 2). The ﬁnal

2 studies revealed that a leader categorization explanation

could best account for dierences in White and non-White

leader evaluations, where White targets were evaluated

as more eective leaders (Study 3) and as having more

leadership potential (Study 4), but only when the leader

had recently been given credit for organizational success,

consistent with the prediction that leader prototypes are

more likely to be used when they conﬁrm and reinforce

individualized information about a leader’s performance. The

results demonstrate a connection between leader race and

leadership categorization.

Sackett, P. R., DuBois, C. L. Z., & Noe, A. W.

(1991). Tokenism in performance evaluation: the eects

of work group representation on male-female and white-

black dierences in performance ratings. Journal of Applied

Psychology, 76(2), 263–267.

Male-female dierences in performance ratings were

examined in 486 work groups across a wide variety

of jobs and organizations. As suggested by the sex

stereotyping literature, women received lower ratings when

the proportion of women in the group was small, even

after male-female cognitive ability, psychomotor ability,

education, and experience dierences were controlled.

Replication of the analyses with racial dierences (White-

Black) in 814 work groups demonstrated that group

composition had little eect on performance ratings. The

eects of group composition on stereotyping behaviors do

not appear to generalize to all minority contexts.

Sagaria, M. A. D. (2002). An exploratory

model of ﬁltering in administrative searches: Toward

counterhegemonic discourses. The Journal of Higher

Education, 73(6), 677–710.

This paper describes administrator search processes

at a predominantly white university in order to explore

whether searches may be a cause for the limited success in

diversifying administrative groups.

Shih, M., Pittinsky, T. L., & Ambady, N. (1999).

Stereotype susceptibility: Identity salience and shifts in

quantitative performance. Psychological science, 10(1),

80–83.

Recent studies have documented that performance in a

domain is hindered when individuals feel that a sociocultural

group to which they belong is negatively stereotyped in

that domain. We report that implicit activation of a social

identity can facilitate as well as impede performance on

a quantitative task. When a particular social identity was

made salient at an implicit level, performance was altered

in the direction predicted by the stereotype associated

with the identity. Common cultural stereotypes hold that

Asians have superior quantitative skills compared with other

ethnic groups and that women have inferior quantitative

skills compared with men. We found that Asian-American

women performed better on a mathematics test when their

ethnic identity was activated, but worse when their gender

identity was activated, compared with a control group who

had neither identity activated. Cross-cultural investigation

35UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

indicated that it was the stereotype, and not the identity per

se, that inﬂuenced performance.

Spencer, S. J., Steele, C. M., & Quinn, D. M.

(1999). Stereotype threat and women’s math performance.

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 4–28.

When women perform math, unlike men, they risk being

judged by the negative stereotype that women have weaker

math ability. We call this predicament stereotype threat and

hypothesize that the apprehension it causes may disrupt

women’s math performance. In Study 1 we demonstrated

that the pattern observed in the literature that women

underperform on dicult (but not easy) math tests was

observed among a highly selected sample of men and

women. In Study 2 we demonstrated that this dierence

in performance could be eliminated when we lowered

stereotype threat by describing the test as not producing

gender dierences. However, when the test was described

as producing gender dierences and stereotype threat was

high, women performed substantially worse than equally

qualiﬁed men did. A third experiment replicated this ﬁnding

with a less highly selected population and explored the

mediation of the eect. The implication that stereotype

threat may underlie gender dierences in advanced math

performance, even those that have been attributed to

genetically rooted sex dierences, is discussed.

Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype

threat and the intellectual test performance of African

Americans. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology,

69(5), 797–811.

Stereotype threat is being at risk of conﬁrming, as self-

characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group.

Studies 1 and 2 varied the stereotype vulnerability of Black

participants taking a dicult verbal test by varying whether

or not their performance was ostensibly diagnostic of ability,

and thus, whether or not they were at risk of fulﬁlling the

racial stereotype about their intellectual ability. Reﬂecting

the pressure of this vulnerability, Blacks underperformed

in relation to Whites in the ability-diagnostic condition

but not in the nondiagnostic condition (with Scholastic

Aptitude Tests controlled). Study 3 validated that ability-

diagnosticity cognitively activated the racial stereotype in

these participants and motivated them not to conform to it,

or to be judged by it. Study 4 showed that mere salience of

the stereotype could impair Blacks’ performance even when

the test was not ability diagnostic. The role of stereotype

vulnerability in the standardized test performance of ability-

stigmatized groups is discussed.

Steele, C. M. (2010). Whistling Vivaldi: How

stereotypes aect us and what we can do. New York, NY: WW

Norton & Co.

Through dramatic personal stories, Claude Steele shares

the experiments and studies that show, again and again,

that exposing subjects to stereotypes—merely reminding

a group of female math majors about to take a math test,

for example, that women are considered naturally inferior

to men at math—impairs their performance in the area

aected by the stereotype. Steele’s conclusions shed new

light on a host of American social phenomena, from the

racial and gender gaps in standardized test scores to the

belief in the superior athletic prowess of black men. Steele

explicates the dilemmas that arise in every American’s life

around issues of identity, from the white student whose

grades drop steadily in his African American Studies class

to the female engineering students deciding whether or not

to attend predominantly male professional conferences.

Whistling Vivaldi oers insight into how we form our senses

of identity and ultimately lays out a plan for mitigating

the negative eects of “stereotype threat” and reshaping

American identities.

Stone, J., Lynch, C. I., Sjomeling, M., & Darley,

J. M. (1999). Stereotype threat eects on black and

white athletic performance. Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology, 77, 1213–1227.

Two experiments showed that framing an athletic task as

diagnostic of negative racial stereotypes about Black or

White athletes can impede their performance in sports. In

Experiment 1, Black participants performed signiﬁcantly

worse than did control participants when performance on a

golf task was framed as diagnostic of “sports intelligence.”

In comparison, White participants performed worse than

did control participants when the golf task was framed

as diagnostic of “natural athletic ability.” Experiment 2

observed the eect of stereotype threat on the athletic

performance of White participants for whom performance in

sports represented a signiﬁcant measure of their self-worth.

The implications of the ﬁndings for the theory of stereotype

threat (C. M. Steele, 1997) and for participation in sports are

discussed.

Sy, T., Shore, L. M., Strauss, J., Shore, T. H.,

Tram, S., Whiteley, P., & Ikeda-Muromachi,

K. (2010). Leadership perceptions as a function of

race-occupation ﬁt: The case of Asian Americans. Journal

of Applied Psychology, 95(5), 902–919. http://doi.

org/10.1037/a0019501

On the basis of the connectionist model of leadership, we

examined perceptions of leadership as a function of the

contextual factors of race (Asian American, Caucasian

American) and occupation (engineering, sales) in 3

experiments (1 student sample and 2 industry samples).

36 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Race and occupation exhibited dierential eects for

within- and between-race comparisons. With regard to

within-race comparisons, leadership perceptions of Asian

Americans were higher when race–occupation was a good

ﬁt (engineer position) than when race–occupation was a

poor ﬁt (sales position) for the two industry samples. With

regard to between-race comparisons, leadership perceptions

of Asian Americans were low relative to those of Caucasian

Americans. Additionally, when race–occupation was a good

ﬁt for Asian Americans, such individuals were evaluated

higher on perceptions of technical competence than were

Caucasian Americans, whereas they were evaluated lower

when race–occupation was a poor ﬁt. Furthermore, our

results demonstrated that race aects leadership perceptions

through the activation of prototypic leadership attributes (i.e.,

implicit leadership theories). Implications for the ﬁndings are

discussed in terms of the connectionist model of leadership

and leadership opportunities for Asian Americans.

Temm, T. B. (2008). If you meet the expectations of

women, you exceed the expectations of men: How Volvo

designed a car for women customers and made world

headlines. In L. Schiebinger (Ed.), Gendered Innovation

in Science and Engineering (pp. 131–149). Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press.

This article describes how a concept car designed by women

was rated highly by men.

Valian, V. (1998). Chapter 1: Gender schemas at work;

Chapter 7: Evaluating women and men. Why So Slow? The

Advancement of Women. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

This book attempts to uncover the invisible barriers that

prevent women from achieving the same professional

success as men. Valian’s arguments are based on statistical

laboratory and ﬁeld studies and center around gender

schemas – our implicit hypotheses about sex dierences.

Though gender schemas are not entirely inaccurate, Valian

argues that schemas alter our ability to evaluate men and

women without bias. In general, the schema of a woman is

incompatible with the schema of a successful professional.

The consequence is that professional women are often

underrated, while their male counterparts are overrated.

Because of these imbalances, however slight, women

accumulate advantage at a slower rate than men.

1a. What does the problem look like in science?

Carrell, S. E., Page, M. E., & West, J. E. (2009).

Sex and science: How professor gender perpetuates the

gender gap. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 125(3),

1101–1144.

Why aren’t there more women in science? Female college

students are currently 37 percent less likely than males

to obtain a bachelor’s degree in science, technology,

engineering, and math (STEM), and comprise only 25 percent

of the STEM workforce. This paper begins to shed light on

this issue by exploiting a unique dataset of college students

who have been randomly assigned to professors over a wide

variety of mandatory standardized courses. We focus on

the role of professor gender. Our results suggest that while

professor gender has little impact on male students, it has

a powerful eect on female students’ performance in math

and science classes, their likelihood of taking future math

and science courses, and their likelihood of graduating with a

STEM degree. The estimates are largest for female students

with very strong math skills, who are arguably the students

who are most suited to careers in science. Indeed, the gender

gap in course grades and STEM majors is eradicated when

high performing female students’ introductory math and

science classes are taught by female professors. In contrast,

the gender of humanities professors has only minimal impact

on student outcomes. We believe that these results are

indicative of important environmental inﬂuences at work.

Casadevall, A., & Handelsman, J. (2014). The

Presence of Female Conveners Correlates with a Higher

Proportion of Female Speakers at Scientiﬁc Symposia. MBio,

5(1). doi.org/10.1128/mBio.00846-13

We investigated the hypothesis that the gender of conveners

at scientiﬁc meetings inﬂuenced the gender distribution of

invited speakers. Analysis of 460 symposia involving 1,845

speakers in two large meetings sponsored by the American

Society for Microbiology revealed that having at least one

woman member of the convening team correlated with a

signiﬁcantly higher proportion of invited female speakers

and reduced the likelihood of an all-male symposium

roster. Our results suggest that inclusion of more women as

conveners may increase the proportion of women among

invited speakers at scientiﬁc meetings.

Clancy, K. B., Lee, K. M., Rodgers, E. M., &

Richey, C. (2017). Double jeopardy in astronomy and

planetary science: Women of color face greater risks of

gendered and racial harassment. Journal of Geophysical

Research: Planets, 122(7), 1610–1623.

Women generally, and women of color speciﬁcally, have

reported hostile workplace experiences in astronomy

and related ﬁelds for some time. However, little is known

of the extent to which individuals in these disciplines

experience inappropriate remarks, harassment, and

37UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

assault. We hypothesized that the multiple marginality of

women of color would mean that they would experience a

higher frequency of inappropriate remarks, harassment,

and assault in the astronomical and planetary science

workplace. We conducted an internet-based survey of the

workplace experiences of 474 astronomers and planetary

scientists between 2011 and 2015 and found support for this

hypothesis. In this sample, in nearly every signiﬁcant ﬁnding,

women of color experienced the highest rates of negative

workplace experiences, including harassment and assault.

Further, 40% of women of color reported feeling unsafe in

the workplace as a result of their gender or sex, and 28%

of women of color reported feeling unsafe as a result of

their race. Finally, 18% of women of color, and 12% of white

women, skipped professional events because they did not

feel safe attending, identifying a signiﬁcant loss of career

opportunities due to a hostile climate. Our results suggest

that the astronomy and planetary science community needs

to address the experiences of women of color and white

women as they move forward in their eorts to create an

inclusive workplace for all scientists.

Ginther, D. K., Schaffer, W. T., Schnell, J.,

Masimore, B., Liu, F., Haak, L. L., & Kington, R.

(2011). Race, ethnicity, and NIH research awards. Science,

333(6045), 1015–1019.

We investigated the association between a U.S. National

Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 applicant’s self-identiﬁed

race or ethnicity and the probability of receiving an award

by using data from the NIH IMPAC II grant database, the

Thomson Reuters Web of Science, and other sources.

Although proposals with strong priority scores were equally

likely to be funded regardless of race, we ﬁnd that Asians

are 4 percentage points and black or African-American

applicants are 13 percentage points less likely to receive

NIH investigator-initiated research funding compared with

whites. After controlling for the applicant’s educational

background, country of origin, training, previous research

awards, publication record, and employer characteristics, we

ﬁnd that black applicants remain 10 percentage points less

likely than whites to be awarded NIH research funding. Our

results suggest some leverage points for policy intervention.

Hale, G. B., & Regev, T. (2014). Gender ratios at

top PhD programs in economics. Economics of Education

Review, 41, 55–70.

Analyzing university faculty and graduate student data for

the top-ten U.S. economics departments between 1987

and 2007, we ﬁnd that there are persistent dierences in

gender composition for both faculty and graduate students

across institutions and that the share of female faculty

and the share of women in the entering PhD class are

positively correlated. We ﬁnd, using instrumental variables

analysis, robust evidence that this correlation is driven by

the causal eect of the female faculty share on the gender

composition of the entering PhD class. This result provides

an explanation for persistent underrepresentation of women

in economics, as well as for persistent segregation of women

across academic ﬁelds.

Keller, J. (2007). Stereotype threat in classroom

settings: The interactive eect of domain identiﬁcation, task

diculty and stereotype threat on female students’ maths

performance. British Journal of Educational Psychology,

77(2), 323–338.

Stereotype threat research revealed that negative stereotypes

can disrupt the performance of persons targeted by such

stereotypes. This paper contributes to stereotype threat

research by providing evidence that domain identiﬁcation and

the diculty level of test items moderate stereotype threat

eects on female students’ maths performance.

Lincoln, A. E., Pincus, S., Koster, J. B., & Leboy,

P. S. (2012). The Matilda Eect in science: Awards and

prizes in the US, 1990s and 2000s. Social studies of science,

42(2), 307–320.

Science is stratiﬁed, with an unequal distribution of

research facilities and rewards among scientists. Awards

and prizes, which are critical for shaping scientiﬁc career

trajectories, play a role in this stratiﬁcation when they

dierentially enhance the status of scientists who already

have large reputations: the ‘Matthew Eect’. Contrary to

the Mertonian norm of universalism – the expectation

that the personal attributes of scientists do not aect

evaluations of their scientiﬁc claims and contributions—in

practice, a great deal of evidence suggests that the scientiﬁc

eorts and achievements of women do not receive the

same recognition as do those of men: the ‘Matilda Eect’.

Awards in science, technology, engineering and medical

(STEM) ﬁelds are not immune to these biases. We outline

the research on gender bias in evaluations of research and

analyze data from 13 STEM disciplinary societies. While

women’s receipt of professional awards and prizes has

increased in the past two decades, men continue to win

a higher proportion of awards for scholarly research than

expected based on their representation in the nomination

pool. The results support the powerful twin inﬂuences of

implicit bias and committee chairs as contributing factors.

The analysis sheds light on the relationship of external social

factors to women’s science careers and helps to explain why

women are severely underrepresented as winners of science

awards. The ghettoization of women’s accomplishments into

a category of ‘women-only’ awards also is discussed.

38 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Committee on Women Faculty. (1999). A Study

on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT. The MIT

Faculty Newsletter, XI(4).

This is the original MIT report that has spurred so many

other studies

Merton, R. K. (1968). The Matthew eect in science.

Science, 159(3810), 56–63.

This account of the Matthew eect is another small exercise

in the psychosociological analysis of the workings of science

as a social institution. The initial problem is transformed by

a shift in theoretical perspective. As originally identiﬁed, the

Matthew eect was construed in terms of enhancement

of the position of already eminent scientists who are given

disproportionate credit in cases of collaboration or of

independent multiple discoveries. Its signiﬁcance was thus

conﬁned to its implications for the reward system of science.

By shifting the angle of vision, we note other possible kinds

of consequences, this time for the communication system

of science. The Matthew eect may serve to heighten

the visibility of contributions to science by scientists of

acknowledged standing and to reduce the visibility of

contributions by authors who are less well known. We examine

the psychosocial conditions and mechanisms underlying

this eect and ﬁnd a correlation between the redundancy

function of multiple discoveries and the focalizing function of

eminent men of science-a function which is reinforced by the

great value these men place upon ﬁnding basic problems and

by their self-assurance. This self-assurance, which is partly

inherent, partly the result of experiences and associations

in creative scientiﬁc environments, and partly a result of

later social validation of their position, encourages them to

search out risky but important problems and to highlight the

results of their inquiry. A macrosocial version of the Matthew

principle is apparently involved in those processes of social

selection that currently lead to the concentration of scientiﬁc

resources and talent (50).

Mervis, J. (2005). A Glass Ceiling for Asian Scientists?

Science, 310, 606–607.

This article documents the low rate of Asian and Asian

American scientists at higher and leadership levels even in

ﬁelds where they are relatively numerous at lower ranks.

Moss-Racusin, C. A., Dovidio, J. F., Brescoll, V.

A., Graham, M. J., & Handelsman, J. (2012).

Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students.

doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211286109 Proceedings of the

National Academy of Sciences, 109(41), 16474–16479.

Despite eorts to recruit and retain more women, a

stark gender disparity persists within academic science.

Abundant research has demonstrated gender bias in

many demographic groups, but has yet to experimentally

investigate whether science faculty exhibit a bias against

female students that could contribute to the gender

disparity in academic science. In a randomized double-blind

study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive

universities rated the application materials of a student—

who was randomly assigned either a male or female name—

for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants

rated the male applicant as signiﬁcantly more competent

and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These

participants also selected a higher starting salary and

oered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The

gender of the faculty participants did not aect responses,

such that female and male faculty were equally likely to

exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses

indicated that the female student was less likely to be

hired because she was viewed as less competent. We

also assessed faculty participants’ preexisting subtle bias

against women using a standard instrument and found that

preexisting subtle bias against women played a moderating

role, such that subtle bias against women was associated

with less support for the female student, but was unrelated

to reactions to the male student. These results suggest that

interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance

the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.

Ross, D. A., Boatright, D., Nunez-Smith, M.,

Jordan, A., Chekroud, A., & Moore, E. Z.

(2017). Dierences in words used to describe racial and

gender groups in Medical Student Performance Evaluations.

PLoS one, 12(8), e0181659.

The transition from medical school to residency is a

critical step in the careers of physicians. Because of the

standardized application process–wherein schools submit

summative Medical Student Performance Evaluations

(MSPE’s)–it also represents a unique opportunity to assess

the possible prevalence of racial and gender disparities, as

shown elsewhere in medicine.

39UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Schmader, T., Whitehead, J., & Wysocki,

V. H. (2007). A linguistic comparison of letters of

recommendation for male and female chemistry and

biochemistry job applicants. Sex Roles, 57(7-8), 509–514.

Letters of recommendation are central to the hiring

process. However, gender stereotypes could bias how

recommenders describe female compared to male

applicants. In the current study, text analysis software was

used to examine 886 letters of recommendation written

on behalf of 235 male and 42 female applicants for either

a chemistry or biochemistry faculty position at a large U.S.

research university. Results revealed more similarities than

dierences in letters written for male and female candidates.

However, recommenders used signiﬁcantly more standout

adjectives to describe male as compared to female

candidates. Letters containing more standout words also

included more ability words and fewer grindstone words.

Research is needed to explore how dierences in language

use aect perceivers’ evaluations of female candidates

Sheltzer, J. M., & Smith, J. C. (2014). Elite

male faculty in the life sciences employ fewer women.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(28),

10107–10112.

Women make up over one-half of all doctoral recipients in

biology-related ﬁelds but are vastly underrepresented at

the faculty level in the life sciences. To explore the current

causes of women’s underrepresentation in biology, we

collected publicly accessible data from university directories

and faculty websites about the composition of biology

laboratories at leading academic institutions in the United

States. We found that male faculty members tended to

employ fewer female graduate students and postdoctoral

researchers (postdocs) than female faculty members did.

Furthermore, elite male faculty—those whose research was

funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, who had

been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, or who

had won a major career award—trained signiﬁcantly fewer

women than other male faculty members. In contrast, elite

female faculty did not exhibit a gender bias in employment

patterns. New assistant professors at the institutions

that we surveyed were largely comprised of postdoctoral

researchers from these prominent laboratories, and

correspondingly, the laboratories that produced assistant

professors had an overabundance of male postdocs. Thus,

one cause of the leaky pipeline in biomedical research may

be the exclusion of women, or their self-selected absence,

from certain high-achieving laboratories.

Wenneras, C., & Wold, A. (1997). Nepotism and

sexism in peer-review. Nature, 387, 341–343.

This study assessed gender dierences in ratings

applications of postdoctoral fellowships from the Swedish

Medical Research Council, as well as predictors of those

ratings. Overall, female applicants were rated lower than

male applicants, and therefore the rate of awards to females

was lower than that to males. Using objective criteria of

scientiﬁc productivity, the researchers found that in fact

female applicants had to be 2.5 times more productive

than their male counterparts in order to receive the same

“competence” ratings from reviewers. Parallel ﬁndings were

reported for U.S. funding agencies in a 1994 GAO report on

Peer Review: Reforms Needed to Ensure Fairness in Federal

Agency Grant Selection. Related issues have been raised

in the recent (2004) GAO report Gender Issues: Women’s

Participation in the Sciences has Increased, But Agencies

Need to Do More to Ensure Compliance with Title IX.

2. How does evaluation bias actually operate?

Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2003). Are

Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A

Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination. American

Economic Review, 94(1), 991–1013.

Empirical study demonstrating impact of implicit

discrimination by race, and not attributable to class.

Bertrand, M., Chugh, D., & Mullainathan, D.

(2005). Implicit discrimination. American Economic

Review, 95(2), 94–98.

Reﬂective discussion of how and where implicit discrimination

operates. Includes useful review of the literature, and fairly

extended discussion of research needed.

Biernat, M. & Kobrynowicz, D. (1997). Gender-

and race-based standards of competence: Lower minimum

standards but higher ability standards for devalued groups.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(3), 544–557.

Stereotypes may inﬂuence judgment via assimilation, such

that individual group members are evaluated consistently

with stereotypes, or via contrast, such that targets are

displaced from the overall group expectation. Two models

of judgment—the shifting standards model and status

characteristics theory—provide some insight into predicting

and interpreting these apparently contradictory eects.

In two studies involving a simulated applicant-evaluation

setting, we predicted and found that participants set

lower minimum-competency standards, but higher ability

40 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

standards, for female than for male and for Black than for

White applicants. Thus, although it may be easier for low-

than high-status group members to meet (low) standards,

these same people must work harder to prove that their

performance is ability-based.

Bobo, L., Kluegel, J. R., & Smith, R. A. (1997).

Laissez-faire racism: The crystallization of a kinder, gentler,

antiblack ideology. In S. A. Tuch & J. K. Martin (Eds.), Racial

attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and change (pp.15–42).

Westport, CT: Praeger.

Studies of racial attitudes in the U.S. present a dicult

puzzle. On the one hand, several recent studies point to the

steadily improving racial attitudes of whites toward African

Americans (Steeh and Schuman 1992; Firebaugh and Davis

1988). These attitudinal trends are reinforced by many more

tangible indicators, most notably the size, relative security,

and potentially growing inﬂuence of the black middle class

(Dawson 1994; Landry 1987). On the other hand, a number

of social policies put forward to improve the status of African

Americans and other minorities, such as armative action,

are often contested if not ubiquitously unpopular (Bobo

and Smith 1994; Kluegel and Smith 1986). Again, signs

of negative racial attitudes are borne out by a number of

tangible indicators such as the burgeoning evidence of racial

discrimination experienced by blacks almost irrespective of

social class background (Bobo and Suh 1995; Kirschenman

and Neckerman 1991; Feagin and Sikes 1994; Braddock and

McPartland 1986; Waldinger and Bailey 1991; Zweigenhaft

and Domho 1991).

Caffrey, M. (1997, May 12). Blind auditions help

women. Princeton Weekly Bulletin.

Based on Goldin, C. & Rouse, C. (2000).

Orchestrating impartiality: The impact of “blind” auditions

on female musicians. American Economic Review, 90(4),

715–741.

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 gender bias in hiring and advancement. Using data

from actual auditions for 8 orchestras over the period when

screens were introduced, the authors found that auditions

with screens substantially increased the probability that

women were advanced (within the orchestra) and that women

were hired. These results parallel those found in many studies

of the impact of blind review of journal article submissions.

Dutt, K., Pfaff, D. L., Bernstein, A. F., Dillard,

J. S., & Block, C. J. (2016). Gender dierences in

recommendation letters for postdoctoral fellowships in

geoscience. Nature Geoscience, 9(11), 805.

The authors examined postdoctoral fellowship

recommendation letters: 1224 letters submitted by

recommenders in 54 countries. Female applicants are much

less likely to receive excellent letters vs. good letters as

compared to male applicants. Letter length diers by region

(longest in the Americas) but letter tone is equivalently

distributed across all regions.

Gopnik, A. (2011). What John Tierney Gets Wrong

About Women Scientists. slate.com/articles/double_x/

doublex/2011/02/what_john_tierney_gets_wrong_

about_women_scientists.html Understanding a New

Study about Discrimination. Slate.

Heilman, M. 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, 386–395.

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 eect 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 eects of sex stereotypes in employment settings.

Heilman, M. E. (2001). Description and Prescription:

How Gender Stereotypes Prevent Women’s Ascent Up

the Organizational Ladder. Journal of Social Issues, 57(4),

657–674.

This review article posits that the scarcity of women at the

upper levels of organizations is a consequence of gender

bias in evaluations. It is proposed that gender stereotypes

and the expectations they produce about both what

women are like (descriptive) and how they should behave

(prescriptive) can result in devaluation of their performance,

denial of credit to them for their successes, or their

penalization for being competent. The processes giving rise

to these outcomes are explored, and the procedures that are

likely to encourage them are identiﬁed. Because of gender

bias and the way in which it inﬂuences evaluations in work

settings, it is argued that being competent does not ensure

that a woman will advance to the same organizational level

as an equivalently performing man.

41UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Heilman, M. E., & Okimoto, T. G. (2007). Why

are women penalized for success at male tasks?: The

implied communality deﬁcit. Journal of Applied Psychology,

92(1), 81–92

In 3 experimental studies, the authors tested the idea

that penalties women incur for success in traditionally

male areas arise from a perceived deﬁcit in nurturing and

socially sensitive communal attributes that is implied

by their success. The authors therefore expected that

providing information of communality would prevent these

penalties. Results indicated that the negativity directed

at successful female managers - in ratings of likability,

interpersonal hostility, and boss desirability - was mitigated

when there was indication that they were communal. This

ameliorative eect occurred only when the information

was clearly indicative of communal attributes (Study 1)

and when it could be unambiguously attributed to the

female manager (Study 2); furthermore, these penalties

were averted when communality was conveyed by role

information (motherhood status) or by behavior (Study 3).

These ﬁndings support the idea that penalties for women’s

success in male domains result from the perceived violation

of gender-stereotypic prescriptions.

Latu, I. M., Mast, M. S., Lammers, J., &

Bombari, D. (2013). Successful female leaders

empower women’s behavior in leadership tasks. Journal of

Experimental Social Psychology, 49(3), 444–448.

Women are less likely than men to be associated with

leadership, and the awareness of this stereotype may

undermine women’s performance in leadership tasks.

One way to circumvent this stereotype threat is to expose

women to highly successful female role models. Although

such exposures are known to decrease women’s leadership

aspirations and self-evaluations, it is currently unknown what

the eects of role models are on actual behavior during a

challenging leadership task. We investigated whether highly

successful female role models empower women’s behavior

in a leadership task. In a virtual reality environment, 149

male and female students gave a public speech, while being

subtly exposed to either a picture of Hillary Clinton, Angela

Merkel, Bill Clinton, or no picture. We recorded the length of

speeches as an objective measure of empowered behavior

in a stressful leadership task. Perceived speech quality was

also coded by independent raters. Women spoke less than

men when a Bill Clinton picture or no picture was presented.

This gender dierence disappeared when a picture of Hillary

Clinton or Angela Merkel was presented, with women showing

a signiﬁcant increase when exposed to a female role model

compared to a male role model or no role models. Longer

speaking times also translated into higher perceived speech

quality for female participants. Empowered behavior also

mediated the eects of female role models on women’s self-

evaluated performance. In sum, subtle exposures to highly

successful female leaders inspired women’s behavior and

self-evaluations in stressful leadership tasks.

Rivera, L. A. (2017). When Two Bodies Are (Not) a

Problem: Gender and Relationship Status Discrimination

in Academic Hiring. American Sociological Review, 82(6),

1111–1138.

Junior faculty search committees serve as gatekeepers to the

professoriate and play vital roles in shaping the demographic

composition of academic departments and disciplines, but

how committees select new hires has received minimal

scholarly attention. In this article, I highlight one mechanism

of gender inequalities in academic hiring: relationship status

discrimination. Through a qualitative case study of junior

faculty search committees at a large R1 university, I show

that committees actively considered women’s—but not

men’s—relationship status when selecting hires. Drawing

from gendered scripts of career and family that present men’s

careers as taking precedence over women’s, committee

members assumed that heterosexual women whose partners

held academic or high-status jobs were not “movable,” and

excluded such women from oers when there were viable

male or single female alternatives. Conversely, committees

infrequently discussed male applicants’ relationship status

and saw all female partners as movable. Consequently, I show

that the “two-body problem” is a gendered phenomenon

embedded in cultural stereotypes and organizational

practices that can disadvantage women in academic hiring. I

conclude by discussing the implications of such relationship

status discrimination for sociological research on labor

market inequalities and faculty diversity.

MacNell, L., Driscoll, A., & Hunt, A. N. (2015).

What’s in a Name: Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings

of Teaching. Innovative Higher Education, 40(4), 291–303.

Student ratings of teaching play a signiﬁcant role in career

outcomes for higher education instructors. Although

instructor gender has been shown to play an important role

in inﬂuencing student ratings, the extent and nature of that

role remains contested. While dicult to separate gender

from teaching practices in person, it is possible to disguise

an instructor’s gender identity online. In our experiment,

assistant instructors in an online class each operated

under two dierent gender identities. Students rated the

male identity signiﬁcantly higher than the female identity,

regardless of the instructor’s actual gender, demonstrating

gender bias. Given the vital role that student ratings play

in academic career trajectories, this ﬁnding warrants

considerable attention.

42 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Nittrouer, C. L., Hebl, M. R., Ashburn-Nardo,

L., Trump-Steele, R. C., Lane, D. M., & Valian,

V. (2017). Gender disparities in colloquium speakers at

top universities. Proceedings of the National Academy of

Sciences, 115(1), 104–108.

Colloquium talks at prestigious universities both create

and reﬂect academic researchers’ reputations. Gender

disparities in colloquium talks can arise through a variety of

mechanisms. The current study examines gender dierences

in colloquium speakers at 50 prestigious US colleges and

universities in 2013–2014. Using archival data, we analyzed

3,652 talks in six academic disciplines. Men were more likely

than women to be colloquium speakers even after controlling

for the gender and rank of the available speakers. Eliminating

alternative explanations (e.g., women declining invitations

more often than men), our follow-up data revealed that female

and male faculty at top universities reported no dierences

in the extent to which they (i) valued and (ii) turned down

speaking engagements. Additional data revealed that the

presence of women as colloquium chairs (and potentially on

colloquium committees) increased the likelihood of women

appearing as colloquium speakers. Our data suggest that

those who invite and schedule speakers serve as gender

gatekeepers with the power to create or reduce gender

dierences in academic reputations.

Nosek, B. A., Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G.

(2002). Harvesting implicit group attitudes and beliefs

from a demonstration website. Group Dynamics: Theory,

Research and Practice, 6, 101–115.

This article demonstrates widely shared schemas,

particularly “implicit” or unconscious ones, about race, age

and gender.

Porter, N., & Geis, F. L. (1981). Women and

nonverbal leadership cues: When seeing is not believing. In

C. Mayo & N. Henley (Eds.), Gender and nonverbal behavior

(pp. 39–61). New York, NY: Springer Verlag.

When study participants were asked to identify the leader of

the group, they reliably picked the person sitting at the head

of the table whether the group was all-male, all-female, or

mixed-sex with a male occupying the head; however, when the

pictured group was mixed-sex and a woman was at the head

of the table, both male and female observers chose a male

sitting on the side of the table as the leader half of the time.

Shaw, A. K., & Stanton, D. E. (2012). Leaks in the

pipeline: separating demographic inertia from ongoing gender

dierences in academia. Proceedings of the Royal Society of

London B: Biological Sciences, 279(1743), 3736–3741.

Identiﬁcation of the causes underlying the under-

representation of women and minorities in academia is a

source of ongoing concern and controversy. This is a critical

issue in ensuring the openness and diversity of academia;

yet dierences in personal experiences and interpretations

have mired it in controversy. We construct a simple model

of the academic career that can be used to identify general

trends, and separate the demographic eects of historical

dierences from ongoing biological or cultural gender

dierences. We apply the model to data on academics

collected by the National Science Foundation (USA) over the

past three decades, across all of science and engineering, and

within six disciplines (agricultural and biological sciences,

engineering, mathematics and computer sciences, physical

sciences, psychology, and social sciences). We show that

the hiring and retention of women in academia have been

aected by both demographic inertia and gender dierences,

but that the relative inﬂuence of gender dierences appears

to be dwindling for most disciplines and career transitions.

Our model enables us to identify the two key non-structural

bottlenecks restricting female participation in academia:

choice of undergraduate major and application to faculty

positions. These transitions are those in greatest need of

detailed study and policy development.

Sommers, S. (2006). On Racial Diversity and Group

Decision Making: Identifying Multiple Eects of Racial

Composition on Jury Deliberations. Journal of Personality

and Social Psychology, 90(4), 597–612.

This research examines the multiple eects of racial

diversity on group decision making. Participants deliberated

on the trial of a Black defendant as members of racially

homogeneous or heterogeneous mock juries. Half of the

groups were exposed to pretrial jury selection questions

about racism and half were not. Deliberation analyses

supported the prediction that diverse groups would

exchange a wider range of information than all-White groups.

This ﬁnding was not wholly attributable to the performance

of Black participants, as Whites cited more case facts,

made fewer errors, and were more amenable to discussion

of racism when in diverse versus all-White groups. Even

before discussion, Whites in diverse groups were more

lenient toward the Black defendant, demonstrating that the

eects of diversity do not occur solely through information

exchange. The inﬂuence of jury selection questions extended

previous ﬁndings that blatant racial issues at trial increase

leniency toward a Black defendant.

43UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Steinpreis, R. E., Anders, K. A., & Ritzke, D.

(1999). The impact of gender on the review of the

curricula vitae of job applicants and tenure candidates: A

national empirical study. Sex Roles, 41(7/8), 509–528.

The authors of this study submitted the same c.v. for

consideration by academic psychologists, sometimes with

a man’s name at the top, sometimes with a woman’s. In one

comparison, applicants for an entry-level faculty position

were evaluated. Both men and women were more likely to hire

the “male” candidate than the “female” candidate, and rated

his qualiﬁcations as higher, despite identical credentials. In

contrast, men and women were equally likely to recommend

tenure for the “male” and “female” candidates (and rated

their qualiﬁcations equally), though there were signs that they

were more tentative in their conclusions about the (identical)

“female” candidates for tenure.

Storage, D., Horne, Z., Cimpian, A., & Leslie,

S. J. (2016). The frequency of “brilliant” and “genius”

in teaching evaluations predicts the representation of

women and African Americans across ﬁelds. PloS one, 11(3),

e0150194.

Women and African Americans—groups targeted by

negative stereotypes about their intellectual abilities—may

be underrepresented in careers that prize brilliance and

genius. A recent nationwide survey of academics provided

initial support for this possibility. Fields whose practitioners

believed that natural talent is crucial for success had fewer

female and African American PhDs. The present study

seeks to replicate this initial ﬁnding with a dierent, and

arguably more naturalistic, measure of the extent to which

brilliance and genius are prized within a ﬁeld. Speciﬁcally, we

measured ﬁeld-by-ﬁeld variability in the emphasis on these

intellectual qualities by tallying—with the use of a recently

released online tool—the frequency of the words “brilliant”

and “genius” in over 14 million reviews on RateMyProfessors.

com, a popular website where students can write

anonymous evaluations of their instructors. This simple

word count predicted both women’s and African Americans’

representation across the academic spectrum. That is, we

found that ﬁelds in which the words “brilliant” and “genius”

were used more frequently on RateMyProfessors.com also

had fewer female and African American PhDs.

Terrell, J., Koﬁnk, A., Middleton, J., Rainear,

C., Murphy-Hill, E., Parnin, C., & Stallings,

J. (2017). Gender dierences and bias in open source:

Pull request acceptance of women versus men. http://

doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1733v2 PeerJ Computer

Science, 3, e111.

The likelihood of computer code modiﬁcations being

accepted by an open source software community was

examined. When the gender of the contributor was

unknown, women’s contributions were more likely to be

accepted than men’s. When the gender was known, the

opposite was true.

Sekaquaptewa, D. (2014). On being the solo

faculty member of color: Research evidence from ﬁeld and

laboratory studies. In S. A. Fryberg & E. J. Martinez (Eds.),

The Truly Diverse Faculty: New Dialogues in American Higher

Education (Future of Minority Studies) (pp. 99-124). New

York, NY: St. Martins Press LLC.

In 1988, Duke University had a plan. In a large eort to

diversify their faculty, each of their 56 departments was

mandated to hire one black faculty member within ﬁve years.

Five years later, administrators conceded that although

25 new black faculty members had been hired, 18 had left

the university. What the administrators may have failed to

recognize is that hiring only one person of color per academic

department can create demonstrable negative experiences

and outcomes directly attributable to the situation of solo

status, or being the only member of one’s racial group in the

department. In this chapter, I review research addressing the

issues faced by junior faculty of color (JFC) who face, as these

newly hired black faculty likely faced, being one of few or the

only person of color in his or her department. This research

provides insight into the heightened visibility experienced

by such faculty members and how it inﬂuences the career

experiences of JFC, and suggests potential strategies for

reducing negative outcomes.

Trix, F. & Psenka, C. (2003). Exploring the color

of glass: letters of recommendation for female and male

medical faculty. Discourse & Society, 14(2), 191–220.

This study compares over 300 letters of recommendation

for successful candidates for medical school faculty

positions. Letters written for female applicants diered

systematically from those written for male applicants in

terms of length, in the percentages lacking basic features,

in the percentages with “doubt raising” language, and in the

frequency of mention of status terms. In addition, the most

common possessive phrases for female and male applicants

(“her teaching” and “his research”) reinforce gender

schemas that emphasize women’s roles as teachers and

students and men’s as researchers and professionals.

44 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

3. Strategies for reducing the impact of bias on judgments

Bauer, C. C., & Baltes, B. B. (2002). Reducing the

eects of gender stereotypes on performance evaluations.

Sex Roles, 47(9-10), 465–476.

This study is one of many showing (1) that people vary

in the degree to which they hold certain stereotypes and

schemas; (2) that having those schemas inﬂuences their

evaluations of other people; and (3) that it is possible

to reduce the impact of commonly held stereotypes or

schemas by relatively simple means. In this study college

students with particularly negative stereotypes about

women as college professors were more likely to rate

accounts of speciﬁc incidents of college classroom teaching

behavior negatively, if they were described as performed

by a female. In the second phase of the study students’

reliance on their stereotypes was successfully reduced

by providing them with time and instructions to recall the

speciﬁc teaching behaviors of the instructors in detail. Thus,

focusing attention on speciﬁc evidence of an individual’s

performance eliminated the previously demonstrated eect

of gender schemas on performance ratings.

Chesler, M. A. (1996). Protecting the investment:

Understanding and responding to resistance. The Diversity

Factor 4(3), 2–10.

This article discusses common barriers to successful

implementation of diversity-related cultural change eorts,

including both those that are intentional and unintentional.

It also outlines strategies for addressing or dealing with

these various forms of resistance.

Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (2000).

Aversive racism and selection decisions: 1989 and 1999.

Psychological Science, 11(4), 315–319.

Investigated dierences over a 10-year period in Whites’

self-reported racial prejudice and their bias in selection

decisions involving Black and White candidates for

employment in a sample of 194 undergraduates. The

authors examined the hypothesis, derived from the

aversive-racism framework, that although overt expressions

of prejudice may decline signiﬁcantly across time, subtle

manifestations of bias may persist. Consistent with this

hypothesis, self-reported prejudice was lower in 1998–1999

than it was in 1988–1989, and at both time periods, White

participants did not discriminate against Black relative to

White candidates when the candidates’ qualiﬁcations were

clearly strong or weak, but they did discriminate when the

appropriate decision was more ambiguous. Theoretical and

practical implications are considered. (PsycINFO Database

Ellison, S. F., & Mullin, W. P. (2014). Diversity,

Social Goods Provision, and Performance in the Firm.

doi.org/10.1111/jems.12051 Journal of Economics &

Management Strategy, 23(2), 465–481.

Economists have studied the eect of diversity on the

provision of social goods and the stock of social capital.

In parallel, management scholars have studied the eect

of diversity in the workplace on ﬁrm performance. We

integrate these two growing literatures and explore these

questions with a unique dataset. A ﬁrm provided eight years

of individual-level employee survey data, which include

measures of the stock of social capital, plus oce-level

measures of diversity and performance. We ﬁnd some

evidence that more gender-homogeneous oces enjoy

higher levels of social goods provision but those oces do

not perform any better and may actually perform worse.

Sensoy, Ö., & DiAngelo, R. (2017). “We Are All for

Diversity, but...”: How Faculty Hiring Committees Reproduce

Whiteness and Practical Suggestions for How They Can

Change. Harvard Educational Review, 87(4), 557–580.

Despite stated commitments to diversity, predominantly

White academic institutions still have not increased racial

diversity among their faculty. In this article Robin DiAngelo

and Özlem Sensoy focus on one entry point for doing so—

the faculty hiring process. They analyze a typical faculty

hiring scenario and identify the most common practices that

block the hiring of diverse faculty and protect Whiteness

and oer constructive alternative practices to guide

hiring committees in their work to realize the institution’s

commitment to diversity.

Stewart, A. J., & Valian, V. (2018). An Inclusive

Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence. MIT Press.

In this book, the authors argue that diversity and excellence

go hand in hand and provide guidance for achieving both.

Stewart and Valian, themselves senior academics, support

their argument with comprehensive data from a range of

disciplines. They show why merit is often overlooked; they

oer statistics and examples of individual experiences of

exclusion, such as being left out of crucial meetings; and

they outline institutional practices that keep exclusion

invisible, including reliance on proxies for excellence, such as

prestige, that disadvantage outstanding candidates who are

not members of the white male majority. Most importantly,

the authors provide practical advice for overcoming

obstacles to inclusion.

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018 45

Stewart, A. J., Malley, J. E., & Herzog, K. A.

(2016). Increasing the Representation of Women Faculty

in STEM Departments: what Makes a Dierence?. Journal

of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 22(1),

23–47.

The focus of this paper is on the process of increasing

the representation of women in STEM as it occurred

in academic departments within a research university

explicitly committed to diversifying the faculty in science

and engineering ﬁelds. The authors used thematic

analysis of interviews with 59 senior faculty drawn from 20

departments to identify forces that enabled or constrained

demographic change over 13 years. The accounts by faculty

from departments that most increased the representation

of women included references to four enabling forces

(open recognition of a serious problem coupled with shame

about past circumstances; strong leadership on diversity

from one or more department chairs; change-enabling

features of the departmental and disciplinary context; and

proactivity in pursuing diversity). The accounts by faculty

from departments that did not increase diversity at all

included reference to three constraining forces (viewing

other priorities as more important than diversity; external

factors that constrain or limit the possibility of change;

and unfavorable features of the departmental context).

Departments that increased faculty diversity somewhat

expressed some enabling and some constraining forces, and

omitted some. The authors discuss the implications of these

ﬁndings for successful departmental change, particularly in

the context of larger institutional change eorts.

Turner, C. S. V. (2002). Diversifying the faculty:

A guidebook for search committees. Washington, D.C.:

Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Informed by the growing research literature on racial and

ethnic diversity in the faculty, this guidebook oers speciﬁc

recommendations to faculty search committees with the

primary goal of helping structure and execute successful

searches for faculty of color.

4. Dual career and work-family issues

Anonymous. (2011). The A to Z of dual-career couples.

chronicle.com.ezproxy.lib.usf.edu/article/The-A-to-Z-of-

Dual-Career/128096/ Chronicle of Higher Education.

Practical commentary and advice for dual-career couples.

Calisi, R. M. (2018). Opinion: How to tackle the

childcare–conference conundrum. Proceedings of the

National Academy of Sciences, 115(12), 2845–2849.

Conferences are vital forums for academic researchers. At

these meetings, scientists communicate new discoveries,

form research collaborations, make contacts with funding

agencies, and attract new members to our labs and

programs. Even with new technological advances that allow

remote communication, resource sharing, and networking,

face-to-face interactions are a crucial component for one’s

career advancement and ongoing education. Early-stage

researchers, who beneﬁt signiﬁcantly from these events, face

some notable barriers to attendance. One major challenge is

what we call the childcare–conference conundrum: Parent–

researchers face a conundrum as they struggle to attend key

conferences and further their careers while ﬁnding care for

the children. Conferences face a conundrum as they assess

how to better accommodate mothers and families.

Correll, S., Benard, S., & Paik, I. (2007). Getting

a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty? American Journal of

Sociology, 112(5), 1297–1338.

Survey research ﬁnds that mothers suer a substantial

wage penalty, although the causal mechanism producing

it remains elusive. The authors employed a laboratory

experiment to evaluate the hypothesis that status-based

discrimination plays an important role and an audit study

of actual employers to assess its real-world implications. In

both studies, participants evaluated application materials for

a pair of same-gender equally qualiﬁed job candidates who

diered on parental status. The laboratory experiment found

that mothers were penalized on a host of measures, including

perceived competence and recommended starting salary.

Men were not penalized for, and sometimes beneﬁted from,

being a parent. The audit study showed that actual employers

discriminate against mothers, but not against fathers.

Goldin, C. (2006, March 15). Working It Out.

nytimes.com/2006/03/15/opinion/working-it-out.html

The New York Times, p. A 27.

Op-ed piece to counter the news and opinion articles that

women, especially graduates of top-tier universities and

professional schools, are “opting out” in record numbers and

choosing home and family over careers.

Kerber, L. K. (2005, March 18). We Must

Make the Academic Workplace More Humane and

Equitable. chronicle.com/article/We-Must-Make-the-

Academic/28101 The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Reﬂection by an academic historian both on the history

of the academic workplace, and the ways in which it is

currently an environment that is both inhumane and

particularly dicult for women faculty.

46 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Lee, Jessica. (2017).

Parents in the Pipeline.

thepregnantscholar.org/wp-content/uploads/Parents-

in-the-Pipeline-Postdoc-Report.pdf

While the numbers of women in STEM remain abysmally low,

the rates of women’s academic achievement in other ﬁelds

have reached or exceeded gender parity. One reason is that

research appointments were not designed to be compatible

with having a family, and the resulting strain pushes women

— and many men — o their career track. This report,

based on the ﬁrst comprehensive nationwide survey of

postdocs who have children, and institutional data provided

by the National Postdoctoral Association, highlights the full

dimensions of this parenthood leak in the STEM pipeline.

Schiebinger, L. L., Henderson, A. D., &

Gilmartin, S. K. (2008). Dual-Career Academic Couples:

What Universities Need to Know (pp. 1-98). Stanford, CA: The

Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

Meeting the needs and expectations of dual-career academic

couples—while still ensuring the high quality of university

faculty—is the next great challenge facing universities.

Academic couples comprise 36 per-cent of the American

professoriate—representing a deep pool of talent. The

proportion of academic couples (i.e., couples in which both

partners are academics) at four-year institutions nationally

has not changed since 1989. What has changed is the rate at

which universities are hiring couples. Academic couple hiring

has increased from 3 percent in the 1970s to 13 percent since

2000. In a recent survey of Canadian science deans, couple

hiring emerged as one of the thorniest issues confronting

their faculties. Administrators in this study concur.

5. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Issues

Atherton, T. J., Barthelemy, R. S., Deconinck,

W., Falk, M. L., Garmon, S., Long, E., ... Reeves,

K. (2016). Lgbt climate in physics: Building an inclusive

community. American Physical Society, College Park, MD.

The authors oer six recommendations that their

committee identiﬁed as the most critical steps the American

Physical Society could take to ensure that LGBT individuals

pursuing physics can enter a level playing ﬁeld.

Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

(July 2018). GLAAD Media Reference Guide (10th ed.)

glaad.org/sites/default/files/GLAAD-Media-Reference-

Guide-Tenth-Edition.pdf.

GLAAD’s Media Reference Guide oers reporters the language

tools they can use to tell stories regarding the lesbian, gay,

bisexual and transgendered culture and people in a way that

brings out journalistic excellence, while portraying the story

participants with dignity, accuracy and fairness.

Russ, T. L., Simonds, C. J., & Hunt, S. K.

(2002). Coming Out in the Classroom . . . An Occupational

Hazard?: The Inﬂuence of Sexual Orientation on Teacher

Credibility and Perceived Student Learning. Communication

Education, 51(3), 14.

This study examined the inﬂuence of instructor sexual

orientation on perceptions of teacher credibility. The

purpose was to determine if college students perceive gay

teachers as less credible than straight teachers. In addition,

the researchers sought to explore the role of teacher

credibility in terms of perceived student learning. In order

to examine these variables, a male confederate presented a

lecture on cultural inﬂuences to 154 undergraduate students

enrolled in eight separate introductory communication

classes. In each class, the confederate was careful to keep

his delivery and immediacy cues (e.g. vocal expressiveness,

movement, and eye contact) natural and consistent.

The confederate’s sexual orientation, however, was

systematically manipulated. Findings indicate that students

perceive a gay teacher as signiﬁcantly less credible than

a straight teacher. This study also found that students of

a gay teacher perceive that they learn considerably less

than students of a straight teacher. To help explain the

complex reasons behind students’ biased evaluations, the

authors have included an in-depth qualitative analysis of

participants’ responses.

Tilcsik, A. (2011). Pride and Prejudice: Employment

Discrimination against Openly Gay Men in the United States.

American Journal of Sociology 117(2), 586–626.

This article presents the ﬁrst large-scale audit study

of discrimination against openly gay men in the United

States. Pairs of ﬁctitious résumés were sent in response

to 1,769 job postings in seven states. One résumé in each

pair was randomly assigned experience in a gay campus

organization, and the other résumé was assigned a

control organization. Two main ﬁndings have emerged.

First, in some but not all states, there was signiﬁcant

discrimination against the ﬁctitious applicants who

appeared to be gay. This geographic variation in the level

of discrimination appears to reﬂect regional dierences in

attitudes and antidiscrimination laws. Second, employers

who emphasized the importance of stereotypically male

heterosexual traits were particularly likely to discriminate

against openly gay men. Beyond these particular ﬁndings,

this study advances the audit literature more generally by

covering multiple regions and by highlighting how audit

47UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

techniques may be used to identify stereotypes that aect

employment decisions in real labor markets.

Weichselbaumer, D. (2003). Sexual orientation

discrimination in hiring. Labour Economics, 10, 629–642.

Little research has been done to examine discrimination

against gays and lesbians in the labor market. Wage

regressions have documented lower incomes for gays

but repeatedly showed higher incomes for lesbians.

The results concerning lesbian women are striking but

can be reconciled with the existence of labor market

discrimination, however. Problems like sample selection

and unobserved heterogeneity—in particular, lesbians’

violation of stereotypical female gender roles—might be

responsible for their higher earnings. To investigate whether

discrimination against lesbians actually does exist, a labor

market experiment is conducted. Job applications of

candidates, who are equivalent in their human capital but

dier in their sexual orientation, are sent out in response to

job advertisements. Furthermore, to test whether increased

masculinity aects labor market outcomes, the applicants

dier in their perceived gender identity. While results show a

strong negative eect for lesbian orientation, gender identity

does not have a signiﬁcant overall impact on hiring chances.

Yoshino, Kenji. (2006, January 15). The pressure

to cover. nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15gays.

html The New York Times.

In this article Yoshino discusses the underlying

discriminatory practice of forcing minorities to assimilate

into the mainstream culture by covering mutable cultural

traits. A wide range of minorities is explored to illustrate how

prone to injustice the American melting pot can be when

faced with diversity.

For more information, call (734) 647-9359.

ADVANCE Program at the University of Michigan

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1290

http://advance.umich.edu

48 UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

cUNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE PROVOST | ACADEMIC AFFAIRS FACULTY HIRING MANUAL | SEPTEMBER 2018

Some of this material is based upon work originally supported by the National Science Foundation

under Grant Number SBE-0123571. Any opinions, ﬁndings, and conclusions or recommendations

expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reﬂect the views of the

National Science Foundation.

ADVANCE PROGRAM

advanceprogr[email protected]

advance.umich.edu

734 647-9359

1214 S. University Ave.

2nd Floor, Suite C - Galleria Building

Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2592