{"id":2423,"date":"2006-06-02T08:07:25","date_gmt":"2006-06-02T15:07:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/06\/02\/race-gender-and-affirmative-action-in-the-hiring-process\/"},"modified":"2006-06-02T08:07:25","modified_gmt":"2006-06-02T15:07:25","slug":"race-gender-and-affirmative-action-in-the-hiring-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2423","title":{"rendered":"Race, Gender, and Affirmative Action in the Hiring Process"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent post about affirmative action in India<\/a> we had a relatively good discussion going in the comments section, but what I realized is that most people don’t have a real understanding of what affirmative action is and how it is actually implemented.\u00c2 Of course, the reason most people don’t know what it is or how it is used is because most people have never sat on a university admissions committee, or they have never been responsible for making hiring decisions in a corporate or educational setting.\u00c2 Having been involve in a few hiring decisions and having been on an admissions committee, I have a little experience, I thought I would share a little about how these committees work.\u00c2 One of the first things that people should know is that affirmative action is used not only for race.\u00c2 Other factors such as national origin, gender, veteran’s status, and age. (For the sake of brevity, I’m only going to discuss hiring, and not admissions.)<\/p>\n

When most universities (not all but most) hire faculty members, they asked that job candidates send their resumes directly to the head of the search committee or the head of the department.\u00c2 Once applications are received candidates are sent a small postcard asking about their basic demographic information, including race and gender (and often a few other questions…like how did you hear about the job, are you a veteran and so on). \u00c2 That card is then sent back to the human resources department or affirmative action compliance office on campus.\u00c2 The search committee does not see this card, and the race and gender of candidates is never given to the hiring committee.<\/p>\n

In the mean time, the hiring committee reviews applications.\u00c2 In both of the committees I have been on there was an initial screening that weeded out unqualified candidates and less qualified candidates.\u00c2 How did we decide who was qualified?\u00c2 It depended on the particular search, but several key issues were…did they have the right area of study, could they teach the classes we were looking for, were they committed to research (at the research school), did they have publications, and would they be done with their dissertation or at least very close to being done.\u00c2 At this stage race and\/or gender were not discussed much at all because it was evident that the candidates were not qualified for the particular position described.\u00c2 Once we had a “long short list,”\u009d which consisted of our top 10 (or so) candidates.\u00c2 We went through their files more thoroughly to look for other possible problems or prospects that may have been overlooked.\u00c2 In one case, we ended the search because we only had 1 candidate who we thought was qualified for the position.\u00c2 This person was a person of color, but we knew that bringing in one person would not pass the muster with the compliance office or the higher level administrators.\u00c2 There is a strong expectation that at least 3 candidates be brought in for an interview, and there were not 3 in the applicant pool who were qualified.\u00c2 In both cases we did discuss race once we had a long short list (The were not many substantive discussions of gender, as women candidates were well represented in the departments.)\u00c2 Both departments had a severe underrepresentation of racial minorities…one department had all Whites, the other had 3 people of color.\u00c2 People on the committee did not agree about how much of a factor race should play, but it was unanimous on both committees that it would be “good”\u009d if we ultimately hired a person of color since the department was not diverse.<\/p>\n

But there was a major obstacle when it came to considering race; we did not know the race of the candidates.\u00c2 For the most part it is easy to figure out what gender people are from their applications, so it would be untrue to say that the process is gender blind.\u00c2 Race can sometimes be determined from a close look at the application, and in some cases a references letter would let people know the race of the candidate.\u00c2 In the committees I was on, many people thought they knew the race of the candidates but were wrong in several cases.\u00c2 I say this because I have met some of the candidates after the fact since the world of sociology is relatively small. (I suspect this would not be the case in corporate settings where resumes and applications are significantly shorter and have significantly less information.\u00c2 It is not unusual to have applications that are over 30 pages, including references, teaching evals and so on.)\u00c2 So unless it was readily apparent from the application, we could not determine race, which makes it very difficult to use race as a factor in the hiring process.<\/p>\n

Once the top candidates are announced, their names are passed on to the university’s affirmative action compliance or human resources office.\u00c2 The office checks the race and gender of the applicants based on the cards returned to them…many of these are not returned and they are optional.\u00c2 The compliance office usually approves the search.\u00c2 The final candidates might not be approved if the department has a long history of not bringing in diverse applicants.\u00c2 If a search is not approved, the compliance office may ask the department to try to increase the diversity of the applicant pool by extending the search or advertising in other outlets.\u00c2 If the department still doesn’t get a diverse group of candidates, then the search could continue as is or be extended.\u00c2 The whole process of revising a search is rare, but not unprecedented.<\/p>\n

Once candidates get to campus they go through a long interview process (which I think is the part of the process that is most opened to racism or sexism).\u00c2 I can say that some people in the interview process strongly believed that if two candidates were equally qualified that candidates from underrepresented minority groups should be offered the position.\u00c2 However, few people thought two candidates were equally qualified.\u00c2 After the interview, most people had a clear favorite candidate, and the department ranked candidates 1-2-3 and decided if they were hirable.\u00c2 It is very difficult get people 20 some people to agree so this part of the process is very difficult.\u00c2 The reason I think the part of the process is most opened to racism is because race seems to dramatically impact how candidates are viewed face to face.\u00c2 But people are allowed to have their biases and do not have to give any particular reason as to why they oppose a candidate.\u00c2 Since the particular hiring committees, I was on didn’t result in hires, I can’t say exactly how the process would have played in those particular cases.<\/p>\n

This is actually why I think affirmative action is not particularly powerful at ending discrimination.\u00c2 It is very limited in its scope.\u00c2 In the cases I have seen the only real stop gap on discrimination is the compliance office.\u00c2 This office also does a very good job at tracking hiring trends, which lets a school know if there is a pattern of exclusion, but as far as the decisions, people are pretty much left up to their own devices to decide on which candidates that they like, which of course means that they still have their biases.<\/p>\n

I give this very long drawn out discussion to let people know how affirmative action in hiring actually works in at least one real life case.\u00c2 There are no quotas and no hiring requirements.\u00c2 In fact, quotas have been illegal since 1978, when the US Supreme Court ruled that quota based affirmative action was not constitutional (See University of California Regents v. Bakke 1978<\/a>). So what constitutes affirmative action? Here are a few examples taken from sociologist Barbara Reskin’s book The Realities of Affirmative Action<\/a>:setting goals and time tables, identifying under utilized talent, using recruitment methods that reach the whole pool of candidates, fully utilizing employees skills, forging alliances with school and community groups to increase pool of possible workers, monitoring sex and race differences in hiring and promotions, self evaluation, advertising as an equal opportunity employer.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What is fascinating about most of these techniques is that they have little or nothing to do with the application review process. Instead they focus more on reaching the full applicant pool, and monitoring overall trends in recruitment. The notion that White applicants or male applicants are put at the back of the pool or ignored is incorrect. Additionally, the idea that women, Blacks, Latinos, or American Indians are put at the front of the pool and some how treated better is also incorrect. In fact, many of the biggest supporters of affirmative action are White business owners and educational leaders, who are mostly male. Most businesses have voluntary affirmative action programs. There have never been laws passed or executive orders issued requiring any type of affirmative action in hiring or promotions for private companies. The reason big businesses want affirmative action is because they benefit tremendously from a diverse workforce, and the impression (often false impression, but image counts) that they do not discriminate. If affirmative action was harmful to Whites, why would White business owners institute affirmative action policies on a voluntary basis.<\/p>\n

Having been involved in a few hiring committees and one admissions committee I can assure people that affirmative action doesn’t exclude Whites, especially those highly qualified Whites. In fact, my personal sense is that the very limited scope of most affirmative action programs allows discrimination to remain firmly entrenched in the hiring and promotions process. But it is important for people to know exactly how a hiring process works in order for htem to understand the realities of affirmative action.<\/p>\n

I’m not posting this entry at Rachel’s Tavern<\/a>, but it will be posted at Ally Work<\/a> if you would like to help me debate with some affirmative action opponents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a recent post about affirmative action in India we had a relatively good discussion going in the comments section, but what I realized is that most people don’t have a real understanding of what affirmative action is and how … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,25,94,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-affirmative-action","category-economics-and-the-like","category-gender-and-the-economy","category-race-racism-and-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}