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We all know that students need exposure to diverse role models and perspectives in order to succeed in multicultural America and the global community. So why are the majority of full-time professors still white males?

“According to AACSB data, men still outnumber women at every rank and in every business subfield, and increasingly so at higher ranks,” says Dean Sharon Matusik of the Leeds School of Business. She points out that a 2015 Poets and Quants study concluded that despite having the highest proportion of female students, top-tier programs had the lowest percentage of female faculty members.

According to the numbers, faculty diversity barely inched forward at U.S. doctoral-status institutions from 2013 to 2017:

• Both black faculty and Hispanic/Latino faculty grew less than one percent
• Asian American faculty grew by 1.2%
• Women faculty grew by 1.7%

As it turns out, complex factors make it difficult to diversify faculty, including a short supply of diverse candidates in some disciplines, implicit bias in hiring and resistance to faculty diversity initiatives.

Strategies for success

In the past few years, some schools have made impressive strides toward diversifying their faculty. Here’s how they’re doing it.

1. Track progress during recruitment.
Leeds School of Business has had considerable success in hiring women to tenure track positions, from 17.7% in 2018 to 25% in 2019; women now make up 25% of Leeds’ full professoriate. And faculty of color make up 30.9% of tenure track faculty.

The key to this jump is tracking progress at each stage of the recruitment cycle. Leeds starts by looking at the percentage of PhDs granted in each business subfield, and then looks at the pool to see if it reflects the same representation. After this, they assess the proportion of campus interviews, job offers and acceptances to see where the issues are. This gives Leeds the ability to evaluate where each subfield is having success or challenges.

2. Educate search committees.
“Getting faculty to look at diversifying our talent pool rather than replicating what we already have is always the biggest challenge. The best candidate does not mean someone who looks like me and was trained like me,” says Dean Eric Spangenberg of the University of California Irvine (UCI) Paul Merage School of Business.

Take Boston College’s approach, for example, to educating their search committees: The associate dean of faculty and academic affairs meets with faculty members to ensure that best practices in equity recruitment are applied. She familiarizes them with the issues of explicit and implicit bias and makes sure they employ strategies to recruit candidates of color. In addition, committees attend training seminars at the Office of Institutional Diversity.

3. Set up spouses and partners for success.
Leeds noticed that a significant number of female job candidates had working partners. To make Leeds an attractive option for this group, Leeds launched a “dual career program” in partnership with its Board of Advisors and Advancement team.

When an employee accepts a job offer, the team connects their partner with career opportunities in the Boulder/Denver area. This strategy has led to an increased yield in offers to women faculty.

4. Create a safe place.
All tenure-track job candidates at Leeds have an in-person conversation with a leader on the Diversity and Inclusion team. The candidate learns about Leeds’ commitment to diversity and can ask confidential questions that s/he may be uncomfortable asking in a traditional interview setting.

5. Implement cluster hiring.
Focused on hiring teams of faculty members to work on particular sets of interdisciplinary problems, has greatly affected faculty diversity—in terms of race, ethnicity and gender—over traditional department search methods.

In fact, a  from the Urban Universities for HEALTH, confirmed that cluster hiring can be a powerful way to build scholarship and faculty diversity.

“Although the process was originally designed to expand interdisciplinary research, [cluster hiring] also impacts both faculty diversity and components of institutional climate, including the learning environment, collaboration, community engagement and success of faculty from all backgrounds,” says the report.

6. Target minority networks.
Some institutions advertise faculty openings in publications, fairs or conferences targeted to the minority academic community. Networking with the NAACP, African American groups and Hispanic communities to find minority candidates has also proven effective. Once hired, retention tends to be good, especially when other minority faculty members have recruited them.

Others schools, like UCI, “hard-target people in disciplines that we know might have an interest in joining our faculty,” says Spangenberg, adding that “one-on-one recruiting and personal involvement by leadership is critical.”

While progress has been made toward a more diverse U.S. professoriate, much more work is needed in attaining equal representation of faculty.

Observes Spangenberg: “The diverse faculty we have brought in have made disproportionate positive differences across our organization. Differing backgrounds offer differing perspectives that enrich all that we do…not just in terms of faculty, but also in terms of student body and staff enrichment.”