What is your department doing to improve diversity in Economics?

Question

Perhaps we can share our best ideas here.

Answer 1

Recruiting is often network dependent. We have used two steps to decrease the negative side of this.

1. We did an extensive search of department web sites to see if there were faculty we would be interested in who would increase diversity. Turns out that by doing this we found people we would like to hire (and did) for reasons having nothing to do with diversity. So we became more diverse and also became better.

2. We are moving toward finalizing a short-list, we ask whether the list has reasonable representation on it. Often the answer is "no," followed by people on the committee immediately thinking of more names who fit the short-list just fine.

Answer 2

Nothing. I think my colleague and I just want to hire the best economists we can. Our few PhD students are all Chinese at the moment, and that's fine too-- we aren't going to discriminate against Chinese just to gain diversity points.

Answer 3

[Sorry I accidently posted my answer as a comment; reposted from last week]

I have always thought we should try to develop some type of blind recruiting process. We do this for journal submissions, so why not for hiring? (This of course wouldn't improve diversity to my desired level, but at least would help further minimize discrimination.) This could be implemented for both the PhD application process and hiring faculty.

Idea: Design an application system that strips the names and any identifiable info of candidates from all material. Letters would be hard, but you could have someone not on the committee manually do this for applications that passed the first review or something. (Some private companies actually do not allow search committees to look at letters at all for this reason.) Don't allow the committee to look at candidate websites until you have an interview list.