Thread by @grimalkina

A lot of people seem to think that adding the blurb “women and minorities are encouraged to apply” at the end of a job ad will fix their hiring practices.

It…will not.

I mean it’s not bad to add this. But there are so many intricacies. For instance, one thing I've been really interesting in for a while: job ads that emphasize essentialist framings of ability, call for "brilliance" and “a genius," absolutely make equitable hiring less likely

Here are some reasons: people who combat stereotypes and prejudice and other such systematic biases are particularly unlikely to either self-identify, or be identified, with essentialist labels. And tying specific job performance to a trait concept is essentializing it.

We’ve studied this mostly with women—e.g., this well cited 2015 Science paper science.sciencemag.org/content/347/62… — but we’ve also seen lots of this emerge early, with children —e.g., science.sciencemag.org/content/355/63…

And it gets worse, because giving people EVALUATION rubrics (the job posts you might give your interviewing engineers??) that emphasize “brilliance” prejudices them against women/minorities(+esp women who are minorities, etc, for all the complicated ways these intersections go)

People who might otherwise give "not like me" folks a chance, have latent beliefs/prejudices which can be suddenly activated against those people when you provoke a bias like this whole "genius" thing. Wow, bias is very complicated!

(You can see this "reluctance to ascribe brilliance to minorities" thing in all kinds of methods. One method I love, looking at words used on ratemyprofessor - journals.plos.org/plosone/articl… )

I think sometimes there is a fascinating paradoxical effect: companies trying hard to get more inclusive, and put encouraging language in their ads, will ALSO double-down on language about “genius” and “rockstar” because they want to reassure that they’re not “lowering the bar”

(Sidenote: equitable hiring doesn’t lower the bar, we study this ad nauseam, prob bc the CURRENT SITUATION= mediocre majority folks are privileged beyond merit—folks always yap on about this it AND YET never acknowledge that mediocre majority boosting is lowering the bar hmmm)

I know tech loves to go “let’s fix minorities’ self-esteem!!” but that’s prob not the biggest issue, e.g. mid-level tech women are accurate about skills, but expect hiring situations to be much harsher than men do (and are they wrong?!). Check out reports- gender.stanford.edu

A lot of places have caught up to the “growth mindset is good let’s champion developing skills for everyone” trend, YET I see this essentialist language spring up like a weed, everywhere.

It’s often to emphasize how special a particular [startup/academic lab/prestigious research center/whatever elite echelon, you’re all the same] is. “I’ll Know It When I See It!” Kind of hiring. “We want rockstar genius ninjas” (&maybe we'll concede some of them can be minority)

The answer is not to keep convincing each group that they Are The Rockstar/Genius/Ninjas.
(Much as I appreciate whatever it takes to encourage individuals, honestly, whatever it takes for individuals)
The better, more sustainable answer is to fix this shit framing, friends.

Phew, that was long. The thing is I truly love this stuff. I went into quant psych because I love how complicated we are. Even in our biases. It's heartbreaking there aren't easy fixes. But isn't it amazing, too, the power of our beliefs? Isn't it better to understand them?

There are GOOD BELIEF cycles we can set up here, not just bad ones. Let's get after them.

Oh weird, twitter seems to collapse that second link in the tweet, idek. Here it is again in case you can't see it: science.sciencemag.org/content/355/63…