Where to advertise a postdoctoral position to widen the diversity of applicants?

Question

I am planning to hire a postdoc (in mathematics), and have never done this before. My department is far from diverse. I have read that a good way to achieve a diverse pool of candidates is by advertising widely, including circulating them to special interest groups.

I can definitely see the benefit of this. Members of underrepresented groups may tend to be less "well connected" in the community and, as a result, the advertisement might have a harder time reaching them. At least, this seems to be part of it.

I would love to advertise widely, and specifically to organizations which will help me reach underrepresented groups. However, I am finding it difficult to find viable options for doing this... Many sites charge hundreds of dollars for each job posting. While I would love to post it everywhere, it doesn't seem realistic. The main things that I have come up with are:

• Mathjobs (https://www.mathjobs.org). I expect that this will reach the largest number of interested applicants (the job is in North America). But this is really just the standard place to post things.
• Association for Women in Mathematics (https://awm-math.org/). This actually seems like a really great option.
• Distributing the advertisement through mailing lists dedicated to my area of mathematics.
• Some professional societies in mathematics allow members to post jobs (I think).
• Advertising the job at the end of research talks (although, it doesn't seem to be that commonly done in my area, so it might be awkward...).
• Advertise to colleagues and ask them to spread it by word of mouth.
• Posting to social media? Although I am a bit wary of this.

Apart from the AWM, I don't really see how any of these will benefit members of underrepresented groups specifically, and, even the AWM is mainly targeting one group. Does anyone have any other ideas? Suggestions?

This post focused mostly on where to advertise the job, but I would also love to get input on all aspects of achieving a large and diverse pool of applicants! Please feel free to share any advice you have.

Answer 1

Where to advertise is only a small part of the challenge in ensuring a diverse pool of applicants.

Checking the language used in the advert is extremely important. It is quite easy to build in words that exclude certain groups of applicants. For example, are you tempted to write that you are a “young dynamic team”? You’re likely to exclude older post docs. The best solution here seems to be to get a diverse group of people to review the advert and ask themselves if they would apply. Use their feedback.

There are also gender decoders that can spot gender-specific language. Try e.g. http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/. This spots more than just using he/she to refer to applicants.

You should think about whether to use “they” or “she” directly in the wording of the ad (s well as "he") to make it clear that gender diversity is desired. This may require legal input in some jurisdictions.

Furthermore you could be very explicit in the types of diversity that you welcome. Give examples of how you support parents, LGBTQ, underrepresented minorities (do you have employee resource groups?), and so on.

You could try to be effusive - not just the classic “we welcome applicants with diverse backgrounds“, but “we cherish and celebrate the differences that all of our colleagues bring to our team” (seen recently in an ad for a startup).

I have to stress that the language used here is purely for example, and you need to get a second opinion or possibly a legal review depending on where you are.

Good luck in getting your Postdoc!

Answer 2

https://jobrxiv.org/ and twitter although I don't know how much math people use either. For my bio-related field they're pretty good.

You'll probably get plenty of diversity in your applicant pool but you'll end up removing most of it when you filter for prestige PhD institutions and advisors. You should try to remember that URMs from second tier PhD institutions are just as smart in aggregate as the population from Stanford or whatever, but are likely to publish worse and have fewer opportunities. Evaluate them based on who's outperformed for their grad environment and in general you'll probably have a bunch of applicants you wouldn't have otherwise considered. (This is also useful for identifying the halfwits from Harvard who have underperformed despite every possible advantage - don't hire them).

Answer 3

The typical advise is that men tend to apply even if they are not a perfect fit for the position, while women tend to only apply if they feel they satisfy all the conditions. Thus, do not exaggerate the requirements in the job posting.

If your university/department/faculty website has lots of pictures of smiling students, make sure the pictures show diversity. According to some research (not public), this is not noticed by the majority but elicits positive attention from some minorities.

An illustrative link of how typical the typical advice is: https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-theyre-100-qualified

Answer 4

Avoid tight deadlines

I am not in your field and not even in the same country, but one piece of advice I would give is to ensure that there is a reasonable span of time between the advertisement and the deadline. It can often take some time for advertisements to actually get noticed, because most people do not check a job site every day, and many people will have very large volumes of electronic mail (hence, it may take a while for them to actually see an advert posted to a mailing-list). Given that you mention a desire to recruit from a diverse pool, it is worth keeping in mind that people with poor health and/or caring responsibilities may find it harder to check for job advertisements regularly and assemble an application in a timely manner.

Basically, you want to avoid situations such as:

I would love to apply for this, but the deadline is 5pm TODAY. If only I had seen the advert last week, I might have been able to apply.

Oh, this job looks fascinating, but it will take a lot of effort to reformat my CV to show me in the best light. Oh, and the deadline is 9am on Monday. More weekend working. Oh, and I had better contact Prof. Domingo to ask for a reference. He never answers electronic mail on the weekend, so I will have to 'phone him and hope he will not mind.

Ah, this would be a dream job. But the deadline is less than 48 hours away, and I promised to take the kids to the beach tomorrow. Would I be a bad mother if I reneged on my promise? I cannot even blame the weather forecast this time! Or maybe, I can take the laptop with me, and be very careful not to get any sand or seawater in it.

Why do I always have to get ill at the wrong time? The mailing-list had an advertisement for this great job a week ago, but by the time I got out of hospital and went through my mailbox properly, I had missed the deadline.

Answer 5

In mathematics, essentially all jobs in North America are advertised at MathJobs.org, so getting more people to see the advertisement will be difficult difficult. Indeed, what is allowed and expected when posting a job opening is very much country dependent.

The candidates will likely be very concerned with the atmosphere in your research group. There are two obvious places possible candidates will look if they are trying to decide to apply or not.

One is the on-line CV that you and other potential supervisors have on your websites. If you did some mentoring be sure you mention that. All those ``synergistic activities'' in your biosketch are things you might want on your website on on an accessible CV.

Before anyone looks at your CV or website, they will be looking at the advertisement. To whom is the advertisement appealing? What campus resources did you decide to mention?

I am not sure about social media as my idea of social media is MathOverflow. I have heard positions mentioned briefly at the end of a talk, so why not do that?

Answer 6

I was recently at a diversity forum, and a Google rep gave a talk that included some of their research on this. They found that in their own job advertisements, there was almost a step function in the number women who applied vs the number of words in the job advertisement. Once the number of words passed a certain threshold, the number of women applicants fell suddenly. (ETA: The theory was this was related to the length of the description of necessary/desirable qualifications)

Also including the boilerplate tagline along the lines of "We welcome diverse applicants of any race/gender/ability..." has been shown to increase diversity in the applicant pool too.