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Faculty Search Committee Best Practices

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  2. Climate, Demographics & Inclusion
  3. Faculty Search Committee Best Practices

Faculty Search Committee Best Practices

The Office of Faculty Affairs is dedicated to increasing the diversity of the Health Sciences faculty and working to reducing bias in the recruitment and hiring process.

Search Committee Briefings

To reduce the effects of unconscious bias hiring in faculty recruitment by search committees, UC San Diego Health Sciences has implemented the following changes to the faculty recruitment process:

  • Added language to all faculty recruitment ads that includes: "UCSD is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer with a strong institutional commitment to excellence through diversity."
  • The Assistant Vice Chancellor or the Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs meets with each FTE search committee to outline the strategies that are recommended to minimize unconscious bias.
    • FTE search committees may contact the Office of Faculty Affairs at hsfacaffairs@ucsd.edu to schedule a training.
  • Faculty Affairs developed a dynamic presentation with audience engagement based on the work of Professor Mahzarin Banaji at Harvard to reduce unconscious bias - Project Implicit

Reducing Unconscious Bias

Project Implicit® was founded as a multi-university research collaboration to support a collaborative network of researchers interested in basic applied research concerning thoughts and feelings that occur outside of conscious awareness and control.

Review the Research on Bias and Assumptions developed by WISELI at the University of Wisconsin Madison for best practices to reduce bias.

Think your letters are not biased? Think again.

Candidate Evaluation Tools

Candidate Evaluation forms adapted from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and WISELI are used to help search committees clearly articulate the reasons that they select candidates. They have been shown to markedly decrease unconscious bias in the faculty recruitment and hiring process.

Helpful Links for Faculty Search Committees

Below are articles describing the gender and salary differences in science and early-career physicians.

Articles