Racial bias can taint the academic tenure process—at one particular point
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.
