Departmental Gatekeepers of Faculty Success

Department chairs are stewards of their students, faculty, staff and are tasked with acting to ensure success for all their department’s members. But they are also charged with increasing measures of excellence that contribute to rankings and stature of their school and university—which include research grants and awards, high-impact research publications, faculty awards, the academic accomplishments of their students, and the visibility and stature of their graduates. Such competing demands for ensuring the success of department members while maintaining stature for the unit can influence department chairs’ decision-making in conscious and unconscious ways that contribute to gatekeeper bias.

In 2023, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a report, “Advancing Antiracism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in STEMM Organizations,” which sheds light on implicit biases that can influence gatekeepers’ decision-making and limit meaningful change in our community. Motivated by those findings, a group of department chairs, all from biomedical engineering departments, met to share our experiences and common behaviors that might influence decision-making. We focused our discussions on how our actions and departmental practice affect faculty member success and equitable advancement, and we came up with some interesting and, at times, surprising conclusions.

In agreement with the National Academies’ report, we recognized that we as people automatically categorize individuals to reduce cognitive load, assuming that we understand a person based on a few external characteristics. Too often, we can do so based on race, sex or ethnicity—well-known cognitive biases. We are not generally aware of the extent to which assignment of departmental functions relies upon such categorization, and the values and traits that we assume map to a particular category.

Yet reliance on such categorization often influences important decisions we make that impact various faculty members, such as teaching assignments (for instance, assuming one set of individuals is not prepared to teach a required undergraduate class), invitations to attend dinner with high-profile visitors, the hosting of award presentations or participation in recruiting events. For example, it’s well accepted that gender-based categorization may lead to female faculty receiving more “nurturing” service assignments, such as undergraduate advising or K-12 outreach, which do not advance scholarship or research.

A more insidious outcome of our implicit biases may arise from historical behavioral norms. From our discussions, we agreed that majority men request raises or other resources and recognition more frequently than nonmajority faculty. Even if the department chair says no to everyone with the same frequency, the higher request rate by majority men will result in their receiving more resources than others. But if we advise women and racial or ethnic minorities to imitate the behavior of their majority male counterparts, we risk having women be perceived as unlikable.

Meanwhile, creating peer groups or mentoring teams to overcome categorization bias may preclude sharing of the unwritten rules for success through informal mentoring and coaching by the majority community. Thus, even well-intentioned mentoring approaches can disadvantage those navigating a path to faculty success.

What’s more, in higher education, we place a high value on academic status, an individual’s perceived or real ability to pursue highly cited publications and large grants. We implicitly categorize those faculty members who publish in highly cited journals, have high research expenditures and are recommended by prestigious researchers or trained at a so-called elite institution. This implicit bias can affect our assessment of faculty applications, decisions for promotion and advancement, and nominations for awards. Without evaluating the original or potential for research, we often attribute greater success to such “higher status” individuals and assume they are innovative, brilliant and important.

That stratification of high-achieving or highly prolific individuals feeds into faculty promotions and hence into well-documented disparities between the numbers of majority men who achieve full professor status and women and minoritized individuals who do. Those higher-status faculty are key to preserving the status of the unit, so they are frequently given exceptional and unwritten privileges—becoming de facto gatekeepers in our STEMM departments. In fact, their status can outweigh that of the department chair and other academic leaders.

In addition, department chairs are not selected based on our lack of cognitive biases or our social motives to maintain the status quo. While department chairs have been shown to make nearly 80 percent of the administrative decisions in a college or university, their commitment to broadening inclusion in STEMM seems to vary considerably.

We generally agree with studies have that found department chairs’ highest priority to be “increasing the amount of sponsored research,” while fewer than 20 percent of department chairs identify increasing racial or gender diversity of faculty (or students) as a top priority. Because gatekeepers evolve from successful scholars within the existing academic system, we very likely have internalized the majority view of success, which, in turn, may limit equitable faculty advancement.

Constructing a New Paradigm

As individuals, our decisions are influenced by many factors, including our personal values, our need to maintain esteem or respect, our fear of a loss in our status or majority position, or our sense that we need to maintain the current system. In STEMM, one step toward more equitable faculty advancement is to consider what we bring as individuals to our roles as gatekeepers. Unconscious biases and their effects on decision-making best emerge in small-group discussions, such as those we undertook. Developing new initiatives with focus groups first can generate awareness of underlying biases and their influences on decision-making.

Another effective approach is to share case studies designed to highlight biased practices such as behavioral discrimination, verbal and nonverbal aggressions, and attributional ambiguity—which the National Academies’ report describes as not acknowledging the accomplishments of minoritized faculty but instead chalking them up to their sex or racial or ethnic status. Department chairs may benefit from compiling a set of case studies to test how we bring biases to our decision-making and to identify individual social motives for maintaining the status quo.

The report suggested generating systems of accountability to identify behavioral patterns of individual gatekeepers. We need to move beyond the standard metrics of accountability and include less frequently used measures, such as award nominations, size and frequency of faculty retention packages, awarding of student fellowships, and faculty time allocations that associate with productivity. Another crucial measure of accountability should be recognition of contributions to diversity, belonging and inclusion, which are essential to the health of individuals in STEMM.

Those values also need to be translated to our professional societies and their processes for member recognition, as the awarding of society status and honors feeds into higher-status positions at the home institution. We anticipate resistance to these changes but felt that an openness to such approaches could bring us closer to the goal to promote and broaden inclusion in STEMM.

Finally, our discussions led us to see value in identifying characteristics predictive of faculty success—resilience, creativity, societal commitment—and describing and evaluating individuals based on those strengths so as to erode categorizations based on race, ethnicity and gender. That approach could reframe how we think about faculty members and their success in STEMM. Discussions on such topics could help gatekeepers and our entire STEMM discipline to construct a new paradigm and avoid traditional metrics that introduce bias in decision-making.

There is a way forward. Department chairs are key gatekeepers of faculty success in STEMM disciplines, together with senior educational administrators such as deans and high-status faculty members. We recognize the importance these roles play in prioritizing inclusion and success of all stakeholders in STEMM. Working together, and starting in small groups with shared top priorities, we can begin to address individual and organizational biases that limit achieving meaningful change in STEMM.