Evaluating Multiple Candidates Simultaneously Reduces Racial Disparities in Promotion and Tenure

Author

• Theodore C. Masters-Waage
• Juan M. Madera
• Ebenezer Edema-Sillo
• Ally St. Aubin
• Peggy Lindner, Missouri University of Science and TechnologyFollow
• Maritza Gaytan
• Heyao Yu
• Christiane Spitzmueller

Abstract

Black and Hispanic faculty – underrepresented minorities (URMs) within academia – face career barriers that come to a crux in promotion and tenure decisions. Leveraging a natural experiment in choice architecture within a dataset of 1804 promotion and tenure decisions across six universities, we find that joint (906 faculty) vs. separate (898 faculty) evaluation reduces racial disparities in faculty outcomes. Specifically, in joint evaluation, an analysis of the simple slopes finds that Black and Hispanic faculty receive, on average, 9% fewer negative votes at the department level than in separate evaluations when controlling for research productivity, school, gender, rank, discipline, department size, and grant acquisition. Using moderated mediation analyses, we calculate that this translates into a 16.2% increase in the likelihood of a Black/Hispanic faculty member receiving a promotion. In a survey of 289 professors who have served on promotion and tenure committees (i.e., the key P&T decision-makers), we find that only 17% of faculty expect joint evaluation to improve underrepresented minority faculty outcomes and, conversely, 43% expect separate evaluation to improve underrepresented minority faculty outcomes. This natural experiment suggests that altering evaluation mode or simulating joint evaluation mode could help address academia's underrepresentation problem, but not in the way decision-makers expect.

Recommended Citation

T. C. Masters-Waage et al., "Evaluating Multiple Candidates Simultaneously Reduces Racial Disparities in Promotion and Tenure," Nature Communications, vol. 17, no. 1, article no. 3080, Nature Research, Dec 2026.

The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69937-5

Department(s)

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

Publication Status

Open Access

Comments

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Grant 1409928

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

2041-1723

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Final Version

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2026 The Authors, All rights reserved.

Creative Commons Licensing

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Publication Date

01 Dec 2026

PubMed ID

41730921