Despite much anecdotal evidence, few studies show pervasive racial bias in promotion and tenure decisions. By analysing 1,571 real promotion and tenure cases across five US universities, Masters-Waage et al. find double standards negatively applied to scholars of colour, and especially women of colour, even after accounting for scholarly productivity.
Shortcoming of this paper is that it is
- 1500+ individuals from five typical research-intensive US-based institutions, so other countries/types of institutions might see differences. Two HBCUs were also excluded, wouldn’t be surprised if they see less racism.
- I believe it was mentioned somewhere that the team only looked at Black and Hispanic faculty members, because other minorities are too few in numbers to look at… If you are wondering, Asians/Asian Americans are not considered minorities in academia.
Original paper, open access & quite easy to read if you are interested
Dataset:
The associated Science News articles, both original URL and archive.org ver:
Fucking finally. It is a well known bias in academia, which is sadly, very difficult to prove without studies like this one.