Not enough women and minorities apply for a job? Change the recruitment committee
UH study suggest practical steps to increase applicant pool diversity
2021-07-06
(Press-News.org) Amid calls for racial and social justice nationwide, businesses and educational institutions are grappling with how to adopt more inclusive organizational practices, including more diversified hiring. However, recruitment teams and strategic leaders often blame their lack of a diverse workforce on a lack of diverse applicants. A large study of recruitment data suggests a simple and efficient way of increasing diversity in applicant pools: have more diverse recruitment committees and leadership teams.
The study, led by researchers at the University of Houston's Center for ADVANCING Faculty Success and published online in the Journal of Applied Psychology, found that when the search committee chair for a job is a woman, 23% more women apply for the job than when the search committee is led by a man. What is more, over 100% more underrepresented minorities (URM), such as Hispanics and Blacks, apply for the job when the recruitment is led by a URM chair as opposed to a non-URM.
In the context of workplace diversity, the concept of homophily - an affinity for similar others - has developed a bad reputation for furthering systemic barriers to opportunity for minority groups. In fact, homophily, if utilized wisely, can be leveraged to increase the representation of women and underrepresented minorities, according to Maryam A. Kazmi, a Ph.D. candidate at UH and the study's first author.
"There is something that women and URM recruiters are doing differently than men and majority group members that encourages more women and URM applicants to apply for a job," she said.
The study, an analysis of three years of recruitment data for tenure-track faculty jobs at a large, public research university, shows that one of the ways in which women and URM recruitment leaders are affecting applicant pools is by appointing more women and URM to participate on the search committees they lead. These women and URM search committee members, together with the leads of recruitment teams, disseminate job ads more widely, specifically to more women and URM potential applicants who then apply in greater numbers. But what motivates them to do so?
Christiane Spitzmueller, professor of psychology at UH and a study co-author, said that women and URM recruitment leads and team members rely on their own experiences in developing applicant pools.
"Women and underrepresented minority recruiters have likely experienced the same structural barriers to entry and career progress that the potential applicants may face. Their own experiences of inequity may make them likely to have a soft spot for similar others facing similar issues. This might motivate women and minority recruiters to work harder to ensure that they do what they can to ensure that more women and URM are made aware of the job opening and are encouraged to apply," she said.
The researchers make a number of policy recommendations for human resource professionals, supervisors and other company executives to ensure more diverse applicant pools, which include:
Posting the job ad on women/minority-specific websites
Cooperating with the organization/institution's diversity and inclusion offices to develop a diverse list of candidates to contact
Posting the position ad through department chair listservs
Calling women or colleagues from historically underrepresented backgrounds to get possible candidate names/recommendations on who to recruit
Using personal networks to recruit
Including language in the job ads promoting the diversity of the department and university to prospective candidates
The study found that women and URM recruiters tend to use different strategies to affect applicant pool diversity, says Juan Madera, study co-author and professor at the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management at UH.
"We found preliminary evidence that women recruiters are more likely to use personal networks to identify and target women/URM applicants, whereas URM recruiters are more likely to use more formal strategies of increasing applicant pool diversity. For example, cooperating with the institution's diversity and inclusion offices to develop a diverse list of candidates to contact and posting the job ad on women and minority-specific websites," he said.
"Women and URM continue to be underrepresented in workplaces. The diversification of applicant pools constitutes an important step for broadening the participation of women and URM in the workforce," says Paula Paula Myrick Short, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Houston. "This study provides evidence of practical steps that organizations can take to increase their applicant pool diversity."
INFORMATION:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-07-06
Findings from a study published today [6 July] in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) have prompted new World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations to use interleukin-6 antagonists in patients with severe or critical COVID-19 along with corticosteroids.
A new analysis of 27 randomised trials involving nearly 11,000 patients found that treating hospitalised COVID-19 patients with drugs that block the effects of interleukin-6 (the interleukin-6 antagonists tocilizumab and sarilumab) reduces the risk of death and the need for mechanical ventilation.
The study, which was coordinated by WHO in partnership with King's College London, University of Bristol, University ...
2021-07-06
ITHACA, N.Y. - As offices nationwide spring back to life, interior space designers and architects will soon have an easy-to-use planning tool to place indoor workplace furniture, staff, partitions and ventilation in a manner that maximizes fresh air flow and reduces the risk of airborne pathogens.
The Cornell Environmental Systems Lab in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning will introduce a new indoor module for their existing Eddy3D software, a professional-level airflow and microclimate simulator that can help improve ventilation.
The new indoor module will be released this summer, while the research supporting it will ...
2021-07-06
Scientists and engineers are constantly looking for ways to better our world.
Synthetic biology is an emerging field with promise for improving our ability to manufacture chemicals, develop therapeutic medicines such as biopharmaceuticals and vaccines, and enhance agricultural production, among other things. It relies on taking natural or engineered pieces of DNA and combining them in new ways in biological systems, such as microbes, bacteria or other organisms.
According to University of Delaware's Aditya Kunjapur, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, as these sophisticated microbial technologies are advanced, scientists need to explore ways to keep these organisms from ending up in the wrong environment.
For example, a bacterium that is good at making ...
2021-07-06
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- What if the COVID-19 virus could be used against itself? Researchers at Penn State have designed a proof-of-concept therapeutic that may be able to do just that. The team designed a synthetic defective SARS-CoV-2 virus that is innocuous but interferes with the real virus's growth, potentially causing the extinction of both the disease-causing virus and the synthetic virus.
"In our experiments, we show that the wild-type [disease-causing] SARS-CoV-2 virus actually enables the replication and spread of our synthetic virus, thereby effectively promoting its own decline," said Marco Archetti, associate professor of biology, Penn State. "A version of this synthetic construct could be used as a self-promoting ...
2021-07-06
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- The fast-moving decline and extinction of many species of detritivores -- organisms that break down and remove dead plant and animal matter -- may have dire consequences, an international team of scientists suggests in a new study.
The researchers observed a close relationship between detritivore diversity and plant litter decomposition in streams, noting that decomposition was highest in waters with the most species of detritivores -- including aquatic insects such as stoneflies, caddisflies, mayflies and craneflies, and crustaceans such as scuds and freshwater shrimp and crabs.
Decomposition ...
2021-07-06
ABINGTON, Pa. -- Counterfeit dominance decreases Anglo-American, but not Asian, consumers' quality perception and purchase intention of authentic brands, according to a team of researchers.
"Counterfeit dominance is the perception that counterfeit products possess more than 50% of market share," Lei Song, assistant professor of marketing at Penn State Abington, said. "Counterfeit dominance is a phenomenon especially concerning for the luxury fashion industry as counterfeit luxury fashion brands account for 60% to 70% of the $4.5 trillion in total counterfeit trade and one-quarter of total sales in luxury fashion goods."
Lei and his team conducted four behavioral experiments with 149 participants on ...
2021-07-06
Increased labour mobility seems to have stopped the racial wage discrimination of black English football players. A new study in economics from Stockholm university and Université Paris-Saclay used data from the English Premier League to investigate the impact of the so-called "Bosman ruling", and found that racial discrimination against English football players disappeared - but not for non-EU players. The study was recently published in the journal European Economic Review.
In 1995, the so-called Bosman ruling turned the labour market for European footballers upside down, introducing a free transfer ...
2021-07-06
Necessity is the father of invention, but where is its mother? According to a new study published in Science, fewer women hold biomedical patents, leading to a reduced number of patented technologies designed to address problems affecting women.
While there are well-known biases that limit the number of women in science and technology, the consequences extend beyond the gender gap in the labour market, say researchers from McGill University, Harvard Business School, and the Universidad de Navarra in Barcelona. Demographic inequities in who gets to invent lead to demographic inequities in who benefits from invention.
"Although the percentage of biomedical patents held by women has risen from 6.3% to 16.2% over the last three decades, ...
2021-07-06
Researchers from Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain) have analysed the way citizen science is practised in Spain. The paper, produced by Carolina Llorente and Gema Revuelta, from UPF's Science, Communication and Society Studies Centre (CCS-UPF) and Mar Carrió, from the University's Health Sciences Educational Research Group (GRECS), has been published in the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM).
Based on the study, a series of recommendations have been put forward to improve how citizen participation in science is carried out. Firstly, they suggest efforts be stepped up regarding the training given for assessing these initiatives or the creation of multi-disciplinary teams with a broad range of ...
2021-07-06
Using an exceptionally preserved fossil from South Africa, a particle accelerator, and high-powered x-rays, an international team including a University of Minnesota researcher has discovered that not all dinosaurs breathed in the same way. The findings give scientists more insight into how a major group of dinosaurs, including well-known creatures like the triceratops and stegosaurus, evolved.
The study is published in eLife, a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal for the biomedical and life sciences.
Not all animals use the same techniques and organs to breathe. Humans expand and contract their ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Not enough women and minorities apply for a job? Change the recruitment committee
UH study suggest practical steps to increase applicant pool diversity