Creative approaches to perform an inclusive faculty search

Abstract

Names are powerful cues that can trigger unintended bias including ingroup favoritism, a cognitive bias that leads people to overvalue the past accomplishments and future potential of individuals who seem similar to themselves. Research shows that anonymous job searches can significantly increase the chance for applicants from underrepresented (UR) backgrounds to be invited for an interview. This result strongly suggests that in traditional (non‐anonymous) job searches, well‐qualified applicants are overlooked due to bias. I will present the design and results from an unusual tenure‐track Assistant Professor search in the department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. Applicants submitted anonymized research statements—no names of people, places, funding agencies or journals—and a short list of diverse candidates was created based solely on de‐identified documents. Our experiment suggests that anonymous application procedures are one potentially useful tool to combat persistent racial hiring discrimination which could explain the very slow increase of UR scientists among research faculty compared to the growth of UR PhDs.