Going up for tenure and promotion can be nerve-wracking for any academic. It’s supposedly an unbiased evaluation of a scholar’s work, but other dynamics can come into play. Now, new research highlights the impact of one of those factors: race. Among more than 1500 tenure and promotion decisions at five U.S. research-intensive universities, Black and Hispanic faculty members received more negative votes than their equally productive white and Asian colleagues.
It’s “some of the most robust evidence of racial bias in promotion and tenure,” says Damani White-Lewis, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied racial disparities in academia but wasn’t involved in the new research. “Now that we have actual data across multiple institutions, it makes for a more compelling case that we need to laser in on this.”
Data on tenure and promotion committee votes are notoriously difficult to come by, as institutions treat them as highly confidential. So, the researchers behind the new study, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, partnered with administrators at five U.S. universities whose offices anonymized and compiled records of tenure and promotion decisions in all disciplines between 2015 and 2022. “That gave us enough of a sample size where we can look at racial disparities,” says author Juan Madera, a professor at the University of Houston.
Madera’s team compared outcomes for faculty members from groups underrepresented in academia—Black and Hispanic—with those who are not: white and Asian. The faculty had self-identified their race and ethnicity to their university’s human resources personnel; too few were Native American, Native Hawaiian, or “other” to allow analysis of these groups.
Race did not appear to influence the typical first step of the review process, when colleagues in the applicant’s department vote on whether they deserve promotion to associate professor with tenure, or—in the case of associate professors—promotion to full professor. But bias began to emerge when the case proceeded to the next step, a vote by the college—a broader group of colleagues from various departments who are likely less familiar with the candidate and their work. “They may know the candidate by name, but they’re not going to know their research very well,” Madera says.
At that stage, Black and Hispanic faculty with high h-indices—a measure of scholarly productivity and citation counts that is often used as a proxy for research quality—actually fared better than similarly productive white and Asian faculty. But when the college committees were evaluating faculty with lower h-indices, evidence of bias against Black and Hispanic scholars surfaced—especially for women. In those situations, “underrepresented minorities, particularly women of color, are held to a different standard,” Madera says. Overall, Black and Hispanic faculty received 7% more negative votes from college committees and were 44% less likely to receive unanimous “yes” votes than their white and Asian colleagues.
It’s not clear why the problem seems to plague college committees in particular. “We can only speculate why that is,” says lead author Theodore Masters-Waage, a postdoc at Houston, but it could be related to those voters’ lack of disciplinary expertise. “You often see more racial and gender biases in scenarios where there’s less detailed information and people have less to go on and then they start relying on the stereotypes that they might hold about someone,” Masters-Waage says.
The votes aren’t the determining factor in whether a faculty member receives tenure and promotion; typically the provost makes the final recommendation to the university’s president and board of regents. Still, they’re critically important because the vote percentages sway the provost. Even one negative vote can serve as a “poison pill,” causing others to look at a case more closely, Masters-Waage says. As Madera notes, “That’s why looking at unanimous votes is so important, because if all the committee members support it, it’s a really strong case.”
The impact of negative votes can be felt even by faculty members who go on to receive tenure and promotion, Madera adds. The votes are supposed to be confidential, but candidates sometimes learn about them through word of mouth. “It is an awful feeling to know that not all of your colleagues value your research or support your career trajectory.” That could lead to a belief that they are not supported by their university—and possibly a decision to begin applying for jobs elsewhere.
The study is important, says Iowa State University professor Cinzia Cervato, because it addresses a common misconception by faculty members who are not part of a historically underrepresented group: The process they went through is the same as what everyone else goes through. The study makes clear that’s not the case, says Cervato, a geoscientist who has studied the tenure process. She hopes the new data will help raise awareness of that and spur change.
One part of the process that merits a closer examination, some say, is how universities solicit external review letters. When a faculty member goes up for tenure and promotion, their department chair will typically solicit letters from disciplinary experts at other universities. According to Madera’s team’s analysis of external review letters, they can be essential for improving voting outcomes for Black and Hispanic women faculty—but only if the letter writers emphasized the candidate’s scholarly productivity.
The problem is that not all universities ask external reviewers, who are chosen because of their expertise in the scholar’s subdiscipline, to focus on their research. For example, many research-intensive universities in the United States ask reviewers to discuss a scholar’s contribution to teaching and service as well, according to a study Cervato and her colleagues published earlier this year. Cervato thinks that practice should stop—especially for teaching, because reviewers would only be able to write about student evaluations. “Student evaluations are very well known that they’re biased against women, faculty who were not educated in United States, faculty of color, faculty with accents,” she says. “It’s a flawed instrument that they would be basing their teaching evaluation on.”
Ultimately, Masters-Waage acknowledges, there isn’t a “perfect pile of solutions for universities to implement” to fix the problem. But he and Madera are hopeful the study will point to problem areas—such as voting at the college level and the language in external review letters. “There’s definitely areas you could focus your effort on,” Masters-Waage says.
And simply having the study out there is a good first step, Cervato says. “The first step of actually countering bias is awareness of bias.”
