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[goingbatty]

I have a question -- I apologize if this has already been discussed, I tried doing a search but didn't turn up anything.

We often get some sort of AA cards after applying for jobs soliciting information on race/ethnicity, gender, etc.  Presumably because the universities have some interest (or legal obligation) in making sure hires are representative of the applicant pool.  Does anyone know if there have been any studies comparing the diversity of applicant pools to the diversity of hires?  Like many posters in these threads, I have become frustrated with what I perceive as a hiring pattern favoring certain genders and ethnicities in my own department, but it could simply reflect that these are representative of the hiring pool.

This assumes that universities would make such data available -- I can imagine their not wanting to do so!

[polly_mer]

Have you read any of the education literature in your field?  For physical science and engineering, this is a big, hot topic so I know that many colleges and universities consider the diversity of the pool compared to the diversity of recent US graduates.  Some searches are cancelled because the pool is not at all representative of the population from which they expect to draw.

However, it's completely unclear how the lucky one candidate can be representative of the pool.  Unless you have an enormous department that hires several people a year, I can't begin to understand the idea of looking at one or two hires in five years as meaning anything.  To see a pattern, one needs more than a couple of data points.  Even I can't extrapolate that far.

Of course, considering my background and the pool in which I find myself, I'm not particularly shocked to be applying at places where no one with a check in one of my EEOC/AA boxes currently holds a TT position and the last person to do so left several years ago.  I don't think that's evidence of anything other than the fact that the possible pool contains very few people who can check that box so naturally very few departments actually have people from that box.

Now, some cases are pretty egregious and discrimination does exist.  I'm not denying that.  However, merely having a three middle-aged Caucasian males constitute the whole natural sciences department doesn't indicate a pattern of discrimination.  Having a physics department of forty middle-aged Caucasian males when ten new hires were made in the past five years may warrant a second glance, but again the mere coincidence is not evidence of discrimination.