Diversity goals - whether explicit or implicit - are usually defined on a large scale, such as the student body of a university or the workforce of a company. However, their implementation often occurs at a smaller scale, as hiring and admission decisions are made by different decision-makers (e.g., HR managers, admission officers) at different points in time (e.g., recruitment rounds). We study the consequences of this phenomenon for selection outcomes, using register data from the selection process of a large study grant program. In the process, evaluators assess a limited number of randomly assigned candidates and vote on their admission outcomes. Our findings provide evidence that evaluators aim at balancing their small number of positive votes with respect to gender, migration background and socio-economic status. Consequently, individual admission chances decrease with the number of other candidates sharing the same attributes in the evaluator’s pool. Our findings highlight that the small-scale implementation of diversity efforts can distort selection outcomes, even when there is no quality-diversity tradeoff at the aggregate level of the candidate pool.
COLLABORATION
Analyses, survey insights and a practical guide mark a key milestone in the Erasmus+ project supporting data-driven vocational training across five European countries.
