Research Team Including Shelly Peyton Reveals Strategies for Engineering a More Diverse Faculty

Creating a diverse faculty in STEM isn’t something that will happen by accident, which is why Provost Professor of Chemical Engineering Shelly Peyton has contributed to the paper “Equitable hiring strategies towards a diversified faculty,” published last week in Nature Biomedical Engineering. As the paper’s authors describe, “the primary goal is to actively recruit a more diverse group of applicants and improve the rate that Ph.D.s from historically excluded groups go on to become faculty members.”

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“Without a diverse academy, we are losing innovation in science and engineering,” Peyton says. “Apart from the moral and ethical imperatives for diversifying our departments, diverse teams lead to the most innovative science, and new solutions to the grand challenges in human health require contribution from folks from new perspectives and diverse backgrounds.”

One part of the challenge is that the pool of faculty candidates is homogenous in the first place—only 4.4% of all doctoral candidates come from historically excluded groups, according to the paper. The next hurdle is then converting people from these groups into faculty positions.

Peyton says that this is an issue because underrepresentation is a problem that feeds into itself. “In the classroom, it’s well documented that students need role models to believe that a path in their discipline is one they can achieve,” she explains.

It’s these kinds of issues that 16 top engineering programs seek to correct. “This paper is from a huge collaborative effort from BME UNITE,” says Peyton. “BME UNITE is a group of 450+ faculty members across the U.S. and internationally with interests in bioengineering and biomedical engineering that are working on anti-racism in the academy.”

According to the team’s research, the six best practices are:

• Preparing the Department: A welcoming environment attracts candidates, so it’s important to get buy-in from everyone: staff, faculty and leadership.
• Plan the Search: Before the actual hiring process begins, the department needs a game plan and a cohesive search committee. Everyone needs to be trained on best hiring practices, roadblocks from previous searches should be addressed and hiring strategies and materials should be revised to reflect a commitment to diversity.
• Recruit a Diverse Pool: This includes actively seeking and recruiting talented applicants.
• Remove Bias from Evaluations: Everyone needs to be on the same page on what qualifications to look for in a candidate—an unbiased, strict evaluation rubric can create a level playing field.
• Interview Inclusively: Conduct a transparent interview process, which includes having students involved, independent feedback after interviews and lessening the impact of potentially toxic faculty members.
• Recruit Proactively: It’s not enough to just give someone a job offer. To increase the likelihood that top candidates will accept, the hiring team should showcase the department. This includes introducing the candidate to students and other members of the university community. Show the candidate that they are entering an environment that has already been made equitable.