Program in Quantitative Social Science faculty and pre-doctoral fellow publish article on faculty diversity

With several other co-authors, QSS Steering Committee Members John Carey and Yusaku Horiuchi, along with a QSS pre-doctoral fellow Katie Clayton, recently published “Who wants to hire a more diverse faculty? A conjoint analysis of faculty and student preferences for gender and racial/ethnic diversity” in Politics, Groups, and Identities. This paper is a part of a larger research program on diversity in higher education.  Carey’s, Clayton’s, and Horiuchi’s book, Campus Diversity: The Hidden Consensus, is forthcoming from the Cambridge University Press. Beyond their work on this project, Professor Carey is engaged in research on democracy and elections, Professor Horiuchi on public opinion, political methodology, and Japanese politics and Clayton on political behavior.  QSS pre-doctoral fellow Katie Clayton, who graduated from Dartmouth in 2018 with a government major and French minor, will start graduate school at Stanford University in Fall 2019.

The abstract of the article is as follows:

What explains the scarcity of women and under-represented minorities among university faculty relative to their share of Ph.D. recipients? Among many potential explanations, we focus on the “demand” side of faculty diversity. Using fully randomized conjoint analysis, we explore patterns of support for, and resistance to, the hiring of faculty candidates from different social groups at two large public universities in the U.S. We find that faculty are strongly supportive of diversity: holding other attributes of (hypothetical) candidates constant, for example, faculty at both universities are between 11 and 21 percentage points more likely to prefer a Hispanic, black, or Native American candidate to a white one. Furthermore, preferences for diversity in faculty hiring are stronger among faculty than among students. These results suggest that the primary reason for the lack of diversity among faculty is not a lack of desire to hire them, but the accumulation of implicit and institutionalized biases, and their related consequences, at later stages in the pipeline