Salma Mousa / سلمى موسى

For a critical, data-driven retrospective on DEI, Keep an eye out for our upcoming book --- Triggered: the Life and Death of DEI!

What did DEI achieve, for whom, and at what cost?

With @lachlanmcnamee.bsky.social and @kylepeyton.bsky.social

Blurb here: t.co/ZUi5qOXYpR

After 20+ years, we can safely say that trickle-down diversity failed in academia.

For that, you need long-term investments in post-docs, mentorship, and other early-career programs.

Which most universities are not incentivized to do. All the cost with none of the visibility and social rewards.

Most Americans support racial equity, diversifying workplaces, and DEI.

But they do *not* like preferential hiring.

Fears of blocked professional advancement among whites and men - fueled by very real, very crude cases - were mobilized by Republican elites to kill the entire DEI movement.

The irony in all this? A conjoint experiment we ran shows students don't care about the race or gender of university presidents.

But they DO care a lot about faculty diversity. There is clear pedagogical value here.

Universities spent 20 years diversifying the roles students care LEAST about.

What explains this?

Academics are hired based on publications, citations, and grant $. Can’t mess with those without internal and legal pressure.

But senior admins are hired based on communication and leadership skills - making these roles easier to diversify without investing in pipelines.

The share of white male assistant professors *has* declined (47%→ 33% from 2004 to 2024).

This is driven by gains among Asian-Americans --- who are super overrepresented relative to Hispanic and Black profs.

There's a real glass ceiling for Asian-Americans in leadership roles, though.

Same pattern for women.

In 2004: 34.7% of senior leaders were women.
In 2024: 58.6%.

This isn’t a weird feature of these universities. 6 out of 8 Ivy League presidents were women by 2023!

But full professors? Moved from 18.2% → 31.1%.

Concrete progress but at half the pace of leadership.

Did anything change after George Floyd?

Senior leadership: +1.08 percentage points more Black after 2020

Assistant Professors: +0.23 percentage points more Black

Leadership was 5x MORE RESPONSIVE to diversity pressures than faculty hiring.

Black representation among full professors has stagnated for 30 years.

It *decreased* from 6.4% → 6.0% between 2004-2024.

But Black representation in senior leadership doubled from 6.7% → 11.6%

The @compactmagazin.bsky.social article relies on cherry-picked data.

Looking at ~5M employee records from public universities, we find:

There isn't a secret cabal of white men pulling the strings — the *top* diversified the most.

The tenure track hasn't been taken over by female or Black profs.

Hi! We hope to have a working paper out soon, I will reach back out.

Would love to be in the loop on what you're working on, too: smousa@ucla.edu

I'm sure things look different by dept, with humanities facing more diversification pressures than STEM. The majority of academic jobs are in STEM.

The employee records make parsing departments difficult. Still, looking at the university as a whole helps appropriately size the problem!

That's definitely possible --- but people (e.g. Compact "Lost Generation" article) fixate on the % Black faculty, which hasn't moved in 30 years. They don't seem to be reacting to where diversification happened; at the top.

Yup. "Backlash" toward DEI driven by conservative elites, not the masses. The trend is even more stark when looking at beliefs about reverse discrimination.