Inspired by one of Mohan's older posts, I finally got around to redoing the Gender - Career Harvard IAT. I completed it twice. The first time, I sort of cheated. I really didn't want "female" to be associated with "family." I got the result I wanted (or close enough): "Your data suggest a slight association of Female with Career and Male with Family compared to Male with Career and Female with Family." But I really was kind of cheating. I thought carefully about the questions before answering. Well aware of the reasons behind my "good" results, I decided to complete the test again. This time I focused on doing it as fast as possible (as they actually do request in the instructions). The results now revealed my gender biases: "Your data suggest a slight association of Male with Career and Female with Family compared to Female with Career and Male with Family."
Just about everyone who completes the Harvard IAT test correctly gets this result or perhaps an even more biased result. The results are not terribly surprising. Focusing on philosophy, most of us philosophers encounter about four men for every five philosophers we come across. When we hardly ever see women at conferences, in book volumes or at work, how could we not associate "male" and "career"? A good number of the males we do encounter have stay-at-home spouses. At least a couple of my successful male colleagues have stay-at-home spouses. So, of course, we are going to associate "female" with "family."
But even if it is easier for me (and other philosophers) to put male names and career concepts in the same category than female names and career concepts, the question remains whether I implicitly believe that women belong at home, whereas men should have careers. The answer to this question should be clear: Of course not. My tendency under pressure to group male names and career concepts together may give rise to biased decisions when I am forced to decide on something very quickly. But my results show that I do a whole lot better when I slow down.
The results of the Harvard IAT test nonetheless illustrate the consequences of fast decisionmaking. Take tenure decisions. The college committees that are supposed to serve as the deans' advisory boards allegedly have read the tenure case material before they meet. Allegedly. That's right! They meet toward the end of the semester. Everyone is busy. Insanely busy. Most of them have not read a single page before they meet. I talked to several people who were on last year's college tenure committee. They admitted that they had not prepared before the meeting. They were too busy. They counted on the others having read the material. They met one hour total. They had to handle 12 tenure cases and 6 promotion cases within one hour. They read a couple of pages from each file, listened to each others' hearsay about the candidates. Then decisions were made.
It's when people make quick decisions like this that they make the kinds of mistakes I made the second time I took the Harvard IAT test. People (including myself) quickly decide that the men should get promoted whereas the women should not. If only committee members had the time to carefully reflect on the cases, if only they had the time to read the files and the factual records, if only they had the opportunity to do that, they probably wouldn't make the mistakes they actually do make.
It's not hard to imagine that similar mistakes take place in all other aspects of academia (and society as a whole). As we approach the time of the job market (aka the meat market) and grad program admissions, it is worth keeping in mind that slowing down when making decisions may make a difference to the fairness and accuracy of the decisions we do make.
But we are all so damn busy. We don't have the time to slow down. Fair decisions may require helping faculty members slow down by giving them course reductions, limiting the number of committees they serve on or by giving them more research money to decrease their needs to apply for multiple grants. Unfortunately, financial restraints may currently prevent university administrators from taking these kinds of measures.
Might it be possible to introduce a kind of blind reviewing process instead? I don't believe this is possible in hiring processes and probably not at the admissions level either. Even at the junior level most of us know a large number of the candidates going on the market, we know where and what they have published, and so on. What further complicates this process is that job applications and applications to graduate school come with letters of reference that reveal just about everything that is worth knowing about the candidates. Worse: It's hard not to be impressed by good letters from famous letter writers. Blinding the name of the candidate, the name of the school the candidate graduated from AND the name of the letter writer might perhaps make it possible to make more objective judgments about candidates.
An alternative approach may be to get more people involved in the screening process. Say you receive 200 job applications that are complete and ought to be taken seriously. In a 20-person department each person could rank 20 applications. Each application is then seen by two faculty members. Using simple statistical measures, a shortlist could then be generated that might be more fair and accurate than current shortlists.
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