Diversity is a strength in academic faculties. A diverse faculty embraces a range of perspectives and experiences, creating a more positive and mind-expanding environment. Most higher education administrators know faculty diversity is a priority, but cultivating diversity can be challenging in today’s sensitive legal and social landscape. If you want your institution to benefit from greater faculty diversity, this guide will give you the strategies you need to achieve it.
Faculty diversity means bringing together people with differing identities and experiences. It involves welcoming distinctive contributions from people of different:
Including diverse faculty members goes beyond ticking demographic boxes. It means embracing their valuable perspectives and promoting positive representation.
A more diverse faculty can enrich your institution in several ways:
It’s important to prepare for obstacles you may face as you aim to promote diversity at your institution. These include:
By using the strategies in this guide, your institution can navigate these challenges successfully and create a more diverse, inclusive environment.
The U.S. Supreme Court reversed decades of legal precedent when it struck down affirmative action in 2023, and diversity initiatives have faced increased social and legal scrutiny. But as a pro-diversity institution, you still have multiple strategies available. Read on to learn 12 of the most effective ways to promote faculty diversity.
You’re more likely to improve your faculty’s diversity if you set intentional targets and track progress. Sharpen the focus of your diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) initiatives by setting SMART goals and objectives. Diversity-oriented SMART goals should be:
Examples of SMART goals to enhance diversity in your faculty include:
Along with SMART goals, faculty diversity key performance indicators (KPIs) help your department set targets, measure progress, and plan interventions. These KPIs are metrics you can track to understand your progress toward greater faculty diversity. Examples of faculty diversity KPIs include:
Adjust these and other diversity KPIs to measure specific groups needing more inclusion in your department. Monitoring your KPIs and sharing updates can motivate and engage your department in the shared mission of cultivating diversity.
Overcoming unconscious bias in the recruitment process to make it more favorable to diversity may require deliberate strategies. One such strategy is to provide your recruitment team with implicit bias training and anti-discrimination resources. These resources can help your team detect and correct the unconscious prejudices we’re all susceptible to when evaluating others.
You can also limit the impact of recruitment biases by appointing a diverse search committee, since committees with women and minority members find more diverse candidates to consider. When candidates reach the interview stage, ensure the questions are free from bias. For example, avoid asking about an interviewee’s marital status or children. Instead, ask whether they are able to commit to the required work hours.
As far as possible, allow your team enough time to carefully review applications, consider credentials, and conduct interviews. By taking the rush out of the process as much as possible, you reduce the risk of recruiters falling back on prejudicial snap decisions, encouraging thoughtful consideration of diverse candidates.
Even if your team is fair in evaluating candidates, recruiting for faculty diversity requires you to attract a diverse pool of candidates. One way to expand your search pool is to broaden your job descriptions and phrasing of departmental needs in your listings. For example, shift language away from quantifying required experience with specific numbers of years toward asking for candidates who can demonstrate competence in core duties and commit to faculty diversity and development.
This reduces the risk of diverse candidates with the potential to excel disqualifying themselves based on listed requirements that could be more flexible. It also avoids perpetuating disparities, as women and minorities may not have had equal opportunities to gain experience. Ensure all your minimum qualifications are relevant to the position, and distinguish required and preferred items.
Job postings should include the required Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) statement, committing to prohibit harassment and discrimination in recruitment. But you can also go beyond this and add your own statement about valuing diversity. This could encourage diverse candidates to recognize your institution’s pro-DEIB values and persist through the application process.
Compensation is a major factor in attracting and retaining faculty. But wage gaps persist. For example, women still earn an average of 84 cents for every dollar men earn across occupations. This problem impacts many universities, with a 14.2 percent gender wage gap in the higher education sector.
Check carefully for any compensation disparities to address in your own department and prioritize equitable pay for all faculty members, including new recruits. Committing to equity in compensation could incentivize diverse applicants to join and remain with your department.
Beyond recruitment, cultivating a diverse faculty depends on creating an inclusive and supportive environment for everyone in your department to thrive. Inclusive faculty support structures and mentorship programs can help retain women and minorities on your faculty. Mentorship programs give new recruits the opportunity to learn from seasoned faculty members who may share some of their experiences and challenges.
Other helpful support structures for diverse faculty retention include:
To attract and retain diverse faculty members for successful careers at your institution, it helps to recognize that their workplace performance connects with other life roles they may have as parents and partners. Introducing and expanding family-friendly policies can help your faculty enjoy a healthier work-life balance while improving productivity during work times. Family-friendly policies include:
Research has found that family-friendly policies like that contribute to increased retention, more diverse teams, and more women in high-level leadership positions.
Ensure faculty members have the administrative structures and processes to overcome challenges, report discrimination, and succeed in every aspect of their roles. For example, faculty should be able to report discrimination at any level and have it addressed. Whether the discrimination is an inappropriate remark from a colleague or pressure from a leader not to use family leave, your institution should have the structures to:
Even as technology’s ability to assist with administrative functions improves, recruiting diverse administrative staff and rewarding their contributions remains important in giving your faculty the support they need.
Each member of your faculty should contribute to a culture that welcomes and celebrates diversity. When everyone shares an appreciation for diversity’s importance and a desire to promote it, your chances of success are far better than through a top-down approach alone, which could be inefficient and divisive. To get everyone on the same page, provide resources to support each member of your faculty in their own journey of growing to understand and advocate for diversity. These resources could include:
Feedback is a helpful resource in identifying obstacles to faculty diversity and opportunities to cultivate it more effectively. You can invite feedback on faculty diversity through student surveys. For example, student survey questions to shed light on faculty diversity include:
Likewise, you can gain valuable insights by asking faculty members questions like:
Provide comment boxes along with these questions to give students and faculty the opportunity to elaborate.
Although human empathy and understanding are vital in cultivating diversity, software tools can make pro-diversity efforts more efficient, engaging, and impactful. Use cases for software to assist in cultivating diversity include:
Cultivating faculty diversity creates a richer institutional environment where all your faculty members and students can thrive. But the process of enhancing your faculty’s diversity comes with challenges, from unconscious bias to limited time and resources. The Watermark Educational Impact Suite (EIS) can help you overcome these challenges and unlock the advantages of diversity for your department.
Our comprehensive higher education software system has user-friendly tools to help you:
Request a free demo to discover how the Watermark EIS can help you cultivate faculty diversity.
