{"id":48655,"date":"2011-10-18T14:20:48","date_gmt":"2011-10-18T18:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=48655"},"modified":"2011-10-18T14:20:48","modified_gmt":"2011-10-18T18:20:48","slug":"developing-a-diverse-faculty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2011\/10\/developing-a-diverse-faculty\/","title":{"rendered":"Developing a Diverse Faculty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Mikki<\/a>
Mikki Hebl speaks with the ALTERR committee, a faculty group focused on discrimination, in the CLAS Dean's Office on Oct. 17. (Ariel Dowski '14 (CLAS)\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Developing a diverse faculty requires overcoming subtle biases in hiring and gathering data to analyze how your institution is responding to the challenge, says Michelle (Mikki) Hebl, a professor of psychology at Rice University who leads a federally sponsored diversity effort there.<\/p>\n

\u201cOvert, blatant discrimination does appear to be on the decrease \u2026 but there are these more subtle types of discrimination,\u201d she said in a lecture Monday at Konover Auditorium sponsored by the co-chairs of the Provost\u2019s Commission on Institutional Diversity, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Jeremy Teitelbaum, and dean of the School of Social Work Salome Raheim.<\/p>\n

Subtle biases show up in application packets and in job interviews, said Hebl. Recommendation letters for women are often shorter and include more phrases that raise doubts about the applicant. Applicants with recognizably minority-sounding names get fewer calls for initial interviews, she said.<\/p>\n

Biases are ubiquitous in the job interview and range from \u201cbenevolent\u201d and condescending behavior to hostility, expressed verbally or nonverbally. They are hard to overcome, she acknowledged, because \u201cWe like ourselves and we like people like us.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a difference between not being any and not being many.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hebl is a principal investigator on a rare ADVANCE grant to Rice from the National Science Foundation. ADVANCE grants are designed to recruit and retain women in science and engineering; UConn is currently preparing an application.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have resources on this campus that are very good,\u201d Hebl said, citing the Industrial and Organizational division of the Department of Psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and psychology faculty here who study bias and how to make hiring selection fair.<\/p>\n

The ADVANCE program \u201chas helped transform our university in really positive ways,\u201d said Hebl. Rice has created a national database for postdoctoral scholars and Ph.D. students in science and engineering fields, providing access to names, references, and contact information for young scholars seeking jobs in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields.<\/p>\n

The database addresses the objection that search committees can\u2019t find suitably qualified minority candidates in STEM fields, she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a difference between not being any and not being many,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Gathering data during interviews and post-interviews is critical for institutions that want to improve their faculty diversity, Hebl said. With it, a university can identify and address the strengths and weaknesses that minority candidates perceive.<\/p>\n

Her advice to UConn: Play to your strengths, identify your weaknesses, deal with the weaknesses, and have equitable searches.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe interview is not the recruitment tool, it\u2019s the selection tool,\u201d she cautioned. She recommended that interviews be tightly focused on questions based on the job\u2019s criteria and highly structured. Each candidate should hear the same questions, and search committee members should rely on notes, not impressions, about the candidate, she advised.<\/p>\n

This is the standard in non-academic employment interviews, she said, and it should be the standard in academia.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also important to have a contact person available for the job candidate to ask questions that would be awkward to ask of a search committee, such as where a spouse can find a job, or what is the gay community like in Storrs.<\/p>\n

Hebl, who ran her 49th marathon in Hartford on Saturday before her talk (finishing in 4:20, a poor time for her, she lamented), had some non-academic reading in mind for her audience, too.<\/p>\n

If you want to know about discrimination, read Dr. Seuss\u2019 The Sneetches!<\/em> she recommended, where social status depends on having a star on the Sneetchian belly, until everyone gets one, posing a new problem of how to discriminate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As UConn prepares to apply for an NSF grant to recruit and retain women in science and engineering, a speaker discusses ways to overcome subtle discrimination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":48661,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[43],"class_list":["post-48655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-14 05:28:13","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48655"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48673,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48655\/revisions\/48673"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/48661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48655"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=48655"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=48655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}