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Scholars dismiss findings, saying they may not represent current climate with Trump administration
African American and female STEM tenure candidates are viewed more favorably than white and male candidates with identical CVs, according to a recent study by two psychology professors.
The study’s preprint, “The Impact of Race and Gender on Tenure and Promotion Decisions in STEM Careers,” found that, in hypothetical situations, “STEM faculty evaluated female and Black candidates’ research record significantly more favorably and recommended them for tenure and promotion at higher rates, compared to male and White candidates with identical CVs.”
The study was conducted prior to the current Trump administration, which the authors noted as significant.
However, a Rutgers University professor who frequently studies similar diversity issues criticized the authors’ dismissal of their results as “probably not true anymore” due to Trump.
This leaves “intact the longstanding belief of social justice activists that biases are powerful and pervasive by rendering this finding a strange outlier — something for which they have no evidence,” Professor Lee Jussim told The College Fix.
The study was published on The Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science website at the end of June.
Authors Deborah Wu and Nilanjana Dasgupta wrote that they conducted the research to “identify bottlenecks and barriers that cause group-based disparities.” Wu is a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, and Dasgupta is a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
When The Fix reached out to the authors, Wu declined an interview, stating that “the paper is currently a preprint and has not yet been accepted by a peer-reviewed journal.”
Regarding the reason for the study, the authors wrote in their paper that “tenure-system academic positions are a pivotal gateway to long-term research and teaching careers, providing scholars professional stability and time to make new research discoveries and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.”
Wu and Dasgupta hypothesized that “female and Black candidates would be evaluated as less seasoned researchers and thus less likely to be recommended for tenure and promotion compared to male and White candidates.”
However, they also offered a competing hypothesis due to what the professors described as the “national attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia in 2020-21” when the research was conducted. As a result of recent cultural events, including the Black Lives Matter protests, “faculty decision-makers may evaluate female and Black assistant professors to be more tenure-ready than their male and White colleagues,” they wrote.
Their findings supported the latter more than the former.
To conduct their research, the authors sent hypothetical CVs of a pre-tenured academic scientist to 786 tenured biology and chemistry professors employed at 183 research universities across the U.S.
The participants were the type of people “typically responsible for tenure and promotion decisions,” according to the study.
The participants saw the same CV, with the only difference being the name of the candidate: “Claire Roberts” for a white female, “Nathan Miller” for a white male, “Monique Jackson” for a black female, or “Darius Washington” for a black male.
The names were chosen based on the most popular names for their respective group on the 2016 U.S. Census. The participants were able to correctly guess the gender and race of the person they were evaluating with 93 to 99 percent accuracy.
The researchers asked the participants to rate the CVs based on seven fields, including the strength of their research record, productivity, and collaboration with students and senior colleagues.
For overall research evaluation, they asked the participants for their impressions on the candidate’s scientific contributions and intellectual leadership. For tenure recommendation, they asked “how likely they were to recommend the candidate for tenure and promotion to the rank of associate professor, based on the research record only.”
The same pattern emerged in every field the scientists were asked to rate the hypothetical candidate on: white male candidates scored the lowest and black female candidates scored the highest despite having the exact same CV.
The authors controlled the participants’ demographics (their race, gender, and rank) to see if their findings remained the same. They found controlling for race produced the same results in five out of the seven fields they were rating on. Controlling for gender did so only with three.
The study was conducted in 2020 through 2021. The professors participating were predominantly white and male.
The authors speculate that because the study was conducted at the height of George Floyd’s murder and Black Lives Matter protests, “racialized and gendered barriers in academia may have been front of mind of faculty decision-makers.”
However, they speculate that the “current climate in higher education has drastically shifted away from discussing diversity in employment since the federal executive orders of 2025 under the Trump administration” and their results may not be generalizable to the current-day context.
Jussim of Rutgers University told The Fix that he disagrees with the speculation. He has conducted research on campus diversity efforts, stereotypes, and ideological discrimination in academic departments.
Although he thinks the study was “excellent” and the interpretation of their results was “on target,” he said “such speculations are entirely unconstrained by evidence” and are “steeped in arguments that flatter and favor progressive worldviews.”
Jussim paraphrased their explanation as: “Yes, we found biases favoring Black and Female candidates, but it’s probably not true anymore.”
He also interpreted it as them saying, “And if so, it’s Trump’s fault.”
“When in doubt, an academic will rarely go wrong by blaming Trump for almost anything. In a recent email exchange having nothing to do with this paper, a prominent Ivy League academic informed me that Trump was going to ‘destroy the world’ (and that is a quote),” Jussim said.
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