Inclusive Scholarship Practices

Unconscious bias can influence our decisions in many different areas- including our decisions when reviewing applications. They can make us unknowingly favor one type of applicant over others or discredit other applicants unfairly. In short, they can have real world consequences.

For example, a 2011 study found that White students have a 40% higher chance of receiving private scholarships than students of Color. When adjusting for differences in financial need, white students receiving Federal Pell Grants still received private scholarships more often than students of Color receiving Pell Grants. The same held true in regards to GPA. In terms of funds specifically designated as merit-based, white students received three times more grant and scholarship funding than students of Color.

A different study published in 2015 found the emails sent from prospective students signaled as White males received email responses sooner than all other categories of students. The study sent near identical emails from fake prospective students to over 6,500 university professors. The names used to sign the emails were randomly picked to signal gender and race (White, Black, Hispanic, Indian, and Chinese).

For both of these studies, it is possible that some of the individuals awarding scholarships or delaying their email responses were acting on their explicit biases. However, a larger portion were most likely acting on their own unconscious biases that ended up favoring White and male students.

When reviewing applications, unconscious biases can be provoked by an applicant’s name, test scores, letters of recommendation, extra-curricular activities and so much more. In most studies testing unconscious bias theories, the subjects or individuals that the unconscious biases favored tend to be from majority identities (white, male, higher socio-economic status, etc.).

Unfortunately, there is currently no way to completely and permanently eliminate biases in ourselves. Being aware that we have biases is important, but it is not enough to mitigate them. Although we cannot do much individually, we can work to reduce the impact of our biases collectively. When we are part of teams, groups, and organizations, we have more opportunities to mitigate and counteract the biases of one another. In other words, we can check each other’s biases and we can set up structures to reduce the influence of one’s individual biases.

There are several different strategies for addressing biases in organizations such as the SEEDS™ (similarity, expedience, experience, distance, and safety) model and the COST™ (corner-cutting, objectivism, self-protection, and time and money biases) model. Both models group different types of known biases (i.e. confirmation biases) into categories and then offer mitigating strategies for each categories.

From these models and the search committee guide created by Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Institute (WISELI), we adapted the following suggestions for reducing the impact of unconscious bias when reviewing scholarship applications:

• Ensure your evaluation criteria is set prior to reviewing applicants. If you are not the one who sets the criteria, make sure you have a clear understanding of the criteria and expectations.
• Before you start reviewing your applications, take a moment to engage in counter-stereotype imaging (i.e. imagine a woman who is a CEO). This will help reduce the influence of assumptions based on common stereotypes.
• Take your time when reviewing applicants. Biases can be intensified when individuals are in a rush, mentally drained, or even hungry.
• Take breaks and consider reviewing your initial evaluations at a later time and from a different perspective. This will give you the opportunity to see the applications with “fresher eyes” and a slightly more objective point of view.
• Treat every applicant as an individual and evaluate their entire application qualifications instead of focusing on the groups to which they belong.
• When reviewing applicants who may be from a different background than your own, take time to consider the similarities you may have with the applicant. While you cannot change your negative biases towards people that are not part of your in-group, you can expand your in-group to include more people.
• Discuss your evaluation decisions with other committee members and justify why you accepted or rejected each applicant.
• Tell your other committee members of any biases you have been previously made aware of and ask them to hold you accountable if they notice this bias in your evaluations.