UC San Diego

Postsecondary institutions have long struggled to build a faculty that reflects the diversity of their student bodies. This issue is particularly dire as research has linked faculty diversity with increased campus satisfaction, cultural awareness, and even graduation rates for students from underrepresented minorities. One potential avenue towards attracting a more diverse applicant pool is through job advertisements, which can influence the application rates of minoritized groups. Using the University of California (UC) as a microcosm of this systemic disparity between student and faculty diversity, we examined advertisements for faculty positions across nine UC campuses from the academic year 2018/19 to 2022/23. We aimed to answer two research questions: (1) is ChatGPT capable of accurately and consistently evaluating the inclusivity of job advertisements, and (2) how has the inclusivity of UC faculty job advertisements in STEM departments changed in relation to inclusion? ChatGPT-3.5 was instructed to score 1,840 advertisements using a rubric that evaluated four categories: Language of the Advertisement, Language of the DEI Statement, Requirement of a DEI statement, and Inclusivity of Criteria. Scores assigned by ChatGPT-3.5 were found to be comparable to scores assigned by humans. A statistically significant change in scores occurred between academic years 2018/19 to 2022/23, suggesting the inclusivity of faculty job advertisements has improved within this timespan. However, some areas of concern that scored comparatively low were advertisements for non-tenure track faculty, ads in Physical Sciences and Mathematics, and the criteria used to evaluate candidates. The lower inclusivity of these areas points to certain deficits in job advertisements, which may act as unaddressed bottlenecks obstructing growth in the diversity of higher education faculty. Identifying these barriers could enhance the recruitment of diverse candidates in universities not only at UC campuses but throughout the US, thus providing students of minoritized groups with an environment more conducive to their academic success.