After years of research, teaching, and service, a faculty member's tenure and future in academia hinge on the evaluations of their peers — senior faculty who serve on promotion and tenure committees. These evaluations can make or break a career — deciding whether a faculty member continues to grow in their field or faces an abrupt halt in their career.
On the surface, this decision-making process presents as meritocratic. However, researchers and commentators have questioned this. While there are claims that modern academia is structured to disadvantage White faculty (e.g., “The Lost Generation” article by Jacob Savage), empirical evidence shows the opposite, with Black and Hispanic faculty being judged more harshly in promotion and tenure decisions. This has spurred calls for reforms to the promotion system in academia to improve the validity of the process and address the longstanding underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic individuals in tenured faculty positions, who comprise 31% of the US population but only 11% of faculty.
A new paper published by Nature Communications says joint evaluation, i.e., evaluating multiple candidates simultaneously instead of separately, is a potential solution. Study results show that this structural change to the decision-making process increases Black and Hispanic faculty members’ promotion chances by 16.2% and effectively eliminates racial disparities in voting at the department level.
The research team led by psychology Professor Christiane Spitzmueller at the University of California, Merced and hospitality management Professor Juan Madera at the University of Houston examined promotion and tenure decisions for 1,804 candidates from 2015-2022.
The team previously documented racial inequities in promotion and tenure in a 2024 paper published in Nature Human Behaviour . However, “identifying bias is not good enough, we need to find ways to redesign decision-making processes to achieve more equitable outcomes”, Spitzmueller said. “Our goal with this work was to leverage advances in decision making research to see how disadvantage and bias can be reduced in easily implementable ways,” Juan Madera added
To do so, the authors leveraged a natural experiment, a powerful design for inferring causality in real-world datasets. It compared promotion candidates evaluated simultaneously with other candidates (i.e., joint evaluation) vs. candidates evaluated individually (i.e., separate evaluation). The results found that joint evaluation significantly reduced the negative votes received by Black and Hispanic promotion candidates and narrowed the gap in negative voting percentage compared to White and Asian candidates from 10% in separate evaluation to 1% in joint evaluation.
This finding is aligned with past research on the benefits of joint evaluation as an “evaluation nudge” to improve decision-making. However, this is the first paper to demonstrate the benefits of this nudge in improving racial equity in high-stakes career decisions. Moreover, this paper answers past calls for the integration of nudge approaches, i.e., changes to the decision environment, into the academic personnel process.
In a period in which past approaches to address racial equity in academia and organizations have come under fire for their limited effectiveness and for sometimes inducing backlash such as “debiasing training” joint evaluation offers an alternative approach. As noted by Theodore C. Masters-Waage, the first author on the paper, the findings of this paper demonstrate that “racial biases can be addressed by changing the environment in which a decision is made.” This approach is advantageous as it avoids placing the full blame on specific individuals for causing racial bias and instead attributes some of it to environmental conditions.
The evaluation nudge used in this study provides a viable, low-cost change to evaluation and advancement systems that will improve equity and diversity of faculty, and maximize student learning and innovation outcomes. Switching to joint evaluations and cluster hiring methods will ensure that institutions abide by their policies and promote a fair decision-making process, while also shifting faculty's prior beliefs about joint evaluations.
Nature Communications
Data/statistical analysis
People
Evaluating multiple candidates simultaneously reduces racial disparities in promotion and tenure
23-Feb-2026
No conflicts