Do Competitive Examinations Promote Diversity in Civil Service?

Abstract

The representative bureaucracy literature provides a growing body of empirical evidence that a representative public workforce enhances the efficacy and legitimacy of public services. However, little attention has been paid to the capacity of civil service competitive examinations to give equal opportunity of access to public jobs to equally competent citizens. To fill this gap, the authors use French databases to analyze whether competitive examinations comprising both written and oral tests ensure equality of treatment for all candidates regardless of gender, place of residence, or place of birth. The results challenge the capacity of these examinations to treat candidates equally, identifying inequalities in the written tests as well as evaluation biases in the oral tests. However, oral evaluation biases tend to offset inequalities in the written tests. Therefore, selection boards take a sort of affirmative action toward the sole successful members of groups suffering such inequalities.

Does the Gender Composition of Scientific Committees Matter?

“…There are 184 fields (settore concorsuale) and approximately 370 subfields (settore scientifico-disciplinare). 15 In about 60 percent of the cases the candidate and the eligible evaluator belong to the same subfield (Table C3).…”

“…We consider three possible interactions: (i) the evaluator was a member of candidate's thesis committee; (ii) one of them had invited the other to sit in her students' thesis committee; or (ii) both of them sat in the same student thesis committee 15. Historically, each Italian researcher was a assigned to certain settore scientifico-disciplinare.…”

Are people better employees than machines? Dehumanizing language and employee performance appraisals

“…As dehumanization has been shown to be more powerful when used toward minority groups, future work should determine whether dehumanization used toward racial or ethnic minorities, women, and LGBT individuals operates in a different way than when used toward an ostensibly white male. Given the push to reevaluate HRM practices to encourage social equity, further examination of dehumanization may shed light on how to reduce cognitive biases against traditional underrepresented groups ( Greenan et al, 2019;Hall and Battaglio, 2018). Further, we focus only on negative dehumanization, but dehumanization with a positive connotation may be especially relevant to the workplace, as it is in athletics.…”

Culture as a Hiring Criterion: Systemic Discrimination in a Procedurally Fair Hiring Process

“…To test for procedural discrimination, we adopt an approach similar to that of Breda and Ly (2015), Breda and Hillion (2016), and Greenan et al (2019) by testing for gender differences in the non-anonymous orals once the anonymous written CSE scores are held constant. Contrary to those examined by Breda and colleagues, however, the oral and written tests we compare are not in the same subject areas.…”