Letters of recommendation are used in admissions and hiring to glean information and qualities which may go unnoticed in the review of an applicant’s file. However, they are also one of the most common places that bias is written into applicant records– sometimes in subtle ways.
The Pullias Center’s Julie Posselt, Steve Desir, and Román Liera are leading an effort to shine a light on this typically unrecognized source of bias that has the power to shape the careers of graduates and other applicants looking to enter or advance in the workforce.
“Third-party validation, what someone tells a person about you, remains an essential component of school admissions and advancing in most careers today,” points out the Pullias Center’s Julie Posselt, an associate professor of higher education in the USC Rossier School of Education. “Often, this ultimately takes the form of a letter of recommendation. These are powerful documents to which people dedicate a lot of time and effort. They are also one of the tools through which gender and racial biases and stereotypes are communicated and normalized. We see opportunity to improve how people write these letters, review them, and ask for them in application processes.”
Steve Desir and Román Liera led the first of two workshops thus far on, “Better Letters: Equitable Practices for Writing, Reading, and Soliciting Letters of Recommendation” to address this very issue.
“It can be easy to look at only the surface meanings of a letter of recommendation,” noted Liera, Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Pullias Center for Higher Education. Workshop attendees explored common biases found in letters of recommendation through activities designed to help them develop the skill-set to manage the common equity dilemmas inherent in soliciting, promoting, and assessing these letters.
“Letters of recommendation are not race neutral,” stated Desir, Project Coordinator for the Pullias Center for Higher Education. “It is critical to check and assess letters for biases, stereotypes, and understandings of minoritized students.”
The event took place at the 2019 National Meeting of the Inclusive Graduate Education Network (IGEN) of which Dr. Posselt is a Principal Investigator, directing its Research Hub. IGEN is a partnership of over 30 disciplinary societies, universities, organizations, corporations, and national laboratories that is leading a paradigm shift in increasing the participation of underrepresented racial and ethnic minority (UREM) students who enter doctoral programs in the physical sciences. Its charge is to advance equity in doctoral education by closing the gap between rates of undergraduate and PhD degree attainment for UREM students, while advancing knowledge and practice about selecting and serving more diverse graduate students.
This month, Liera and Posselt led a similar workshop for faculty and administrators at the University of Maryland-College Park. “Letters of recommendation should be part of an equity-oriented holistic review to provide helpful context about students as whole people,” Liera pointed out, which is a valuable takeaway when thinking about what is an almost ubiquitous part of the application process. “Letters of recommendation are an important data point to triangulate with other parts of the applicant’s file.”
