Grapevine

Combating promotion and tenure bias against Black and Hispanic faculty

Black and Hispanic faculty members seeking promotion at research universities face career-damaging biases, with their scholarly production judged more harshly than that of their peers, according to an initiative co-led by the University of California, Merced that aims to uncover the roots of these biases and develop strategies for change.

Junior professors are generally evaluated and voted on for promotion and tenure by committees comprising senior colleagues. In one of the studies conducted by the research team, results suggest that faculty from underrepresented minorities received 7% more negative votes from committees than their non-minority peers. Further, minority faculty were 44% less likely to receive unanimous votes of approval. The judgment of women minority faculty was particularly harsh.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, are part of a research program co-led by the University of Houston. The program began four years ago to identify bias in academic evaluations. Current research focuses on understanding what drives the biases and developing policies to mitigate them.

The development of a Center for Equity in Faculty Advancement is being led by UC Merced psychology Professor Christiane Spitzmueller, a member of the university's Health Sciences Research Institute and a lead investigator for the research initiative.

The initiative underscores and partially explains the lack of faculty from underrepresented minorities on U.S. campuses. Blacks and Hispanics account for only 14% of the nation's assistant professors and 8% of its full professors, while those minorities make up 30% of the U.S. population.