The screengrab below is from a job advertisement for a senior academic role at a mid-ranking U.K. university (to which I have no connection), paying a maximum salary of around £63,000 a year. (For context, the median full-time salary in the UK is approximately £33,000.)
British universities frequently advertise a commitment to the Athena SWAN Charter, which is a set of ten principles designed to promote and support equality between genders in institutions of higher education, and which allocates bronze, silver and gold awards on application by such institutions. That universities should remove barriers that unfairly prevent employees from achieving their full potential is a project that almost anybody can get behind – even if we recognise that there is a certain amount of rent-seeking going on whenever a body sets itself up to give out industry awards of this kind.
But explicitly adopting an “inclusive recruitment process” for the furtherance of equality between men and women in higher education is a new one on me – especially when it is so transparently and obviously wrongheaded (although I suppose nothing should surprise me in this regard anymore). The ‘logic’, if I can use that word, would appear to be that if all shortlisted candidates know in advance what they will be asked at interview, and also know that there will be no unexpected questions or digressions (and can even bring pre-prepared notes on their answers), there will be a level playing field between them and – presumably – no danger of any particular candidate benefiting from the conversation straying into irrelevant areas (“Oh, I didn’t know you were a West Ham supporter too! The job’s yours!”).
Michel Foucault once said that something doesn’t have to be bad to be dangerous. That’s true. But it is definitely possible for something to be both bad and dangerous, and this is a paradigm case.
Badness first. I don’t know if you have ever interviewed a candidate for a job – I must have been involved in something approaching 100 such events – but one thing you will never hear anybody who has performed many interviews say is that they wished the candidates would be more homogenous in their answers. Everyone gives cookie-cutter answers to interview questions – except for the 1% who are misguidedly honest and the 1% who don’t give a toss because they’ve already got a better offer and are just attending the interview for a free meal and a night’s stay at a hotel.
Read More: The Dumbing Down of Universities by Making Them ‘Inclusive’ Undermines Their Purpose
