Affirmative Action Policies in Academic Job Advertisements: Do They Facilitate or Hinder Gender Discrimination in Hiring Processes for Professorships?

Abstract

Evidence of female-favoring hiring preferences for assistant professorships suggests that universities can implement affirmative action programs successfully. However, research on the role of applicant gender and the actual use of affirmative action policies in hiring processes for high-level professorships remain scarce. A web-based experiment with 481 economic university members assessed whether evaluators perceived a female applicant as less qualified than a male applicant for an associate professorship position when the job advertisement highlighted the university’s commitment to affirmative action (gender-based preferential selection) but not when it solely highlighted its commitment to excellence (non-gender-based selection). Contrary to previous experimental findings that affirmative action would adversely affect female applicants, evaluators perceived the female applicant as more hirable and ranked her first for the job significantly more often than the male candidate. Furthermore, male evaluators had a stronger preference for the female candidate in the gender-based condition than in the non-gender-based condition and a stronger preference for the male candidate in the non-gender-based condition than in the gender-based condition. Overall, the results provide evidence that gender-based preferential selection policies can evoke their intended effect to bring highly qualified women to high-level professorships, especially when being evaluated by non-beneficiaries of these policies, such as men.

Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration

“…8. A number of similar findings appeared after our 2020 termination date (Henningsen et al, 2021;Kallens et al, 2022;Solga et al, 2023). Henningsen and her associates published their data several months after the close of the inclusion period, so we did not include their data in our analysis, but had we done so, the conclusions we reached in this article would be further bolstered.…”

“…But when it comes to specific claims about biased grant reviewers, search committee members, journal editors, and letter writers, the claims of antifemale bias were not supported, and in one case (tenure-track hiring), the data actually supported the opposite conclusion—that of pro-female hiring bias. This pro-female hiring advantage has continued after the closing of our inclusionary period, 2020 ( Henningsen et al, 2021 ; Solga et al, 2023 ).…”

“…In the 22 years since Steinpreis et al's (1999) study, their finding has been supplanted by neutral and pro-female hiring results from larger studies (Breda & Hillion, 2016;Carey et al, 2020;M. Carlsson et al, 2021;Henningsen et al, 2021;. Identical-CV experiments for non-tenure-track jobs, particularly when candidates do not have unambiguously high qualifications (Eaton et al, 2020;Moss-Racusin et al, 2012) and when evaluators are neither experienced professionals nor have much at stake, are not predictive of the outcomes of hiring of excellent male and female tenure-track applicants, despite these non-tenure-trackhiring studies being cited more often than the latter (evidence presented in the Discussion section).…”

“…We supplemented these searches with a bottom-up search of every individual cite to each of these five studies (> 1,300 cited studies). No other experimental tenure-track study emerged during the past 20 years, save one that was published a few months after the closing of the inclusion period ( Henningsen et al, 2021 ).…”

Work-Related Flow in Career Sustainability

“…Efforts in promoting work-related flow for career sustainability should also concentrate on finding the ways and means for more women to enter the conditions for flow through access to active, tenured, and low-strain jobs with high decision latitude. Affirmative action policies have been found successful in this regard [60]. Studying the works by Csikszentmihalyi regarding work-related flow mentioned in Figure 1 would be additionally helpful in supporting sustainable careers.…”