Evaluating multiple candidates simultaneously reduces racial disparities in promotion and tenure

Abstract Black and Hispanic faculty – underrepresented minorities (URMs) within academia – face career barriers that come to a crux in promotion and tenure decisions. Leveraging a natural experiment in choice architecture within a dataset of 1804 promotion and tenure decisions across six universities, we find that joint (906 faculty) vs. separate (898 faculty) evaluation reduces racial disparities in faculty outcomes. Specifically, in joint evaluation, an analysis of the simple slopes finds that Black and Hispanic faculty receive, on average, 9% fewer negative votes at the department level than in separate evaluations when controlling for research productivity, school, gender, rank, discipline, department size, and grant acquisition. Using moderated mediation analyses, we calculate that this translates into a 16.2% increase in the likelihood of a Black/Hispanic faculty member receiving a promotion. In a survey of 289 professors who have served on promotion and tenure committees (i.e., the key P&T decision-makers), we find that only 17% of faculty expect joint evaluation to improve underrepresented minority faculty outcomes and, conversely, 43% expect separate evaluation to improve underrepresented minority faculty outcomes. This natural experiment suggests that altering evaluation mode or simulating joint evaluation mode could help address academia’s underrepresentation problem, but not in the way decision-makers expect.