Unpacking Merit, Fit, and Diversity: A Multifaceted Framework to Academic Gatekeeping in Social Sciences at U.S. R1 Research Universities

This study draws on interviews with 50 sociology and business professors across two private and five public American universities, and proposes a novel “Merit‐Fit‐Diversit” framework to show how narratives of merit, fit, and diversity emerge at different evaluation stages of tenure‐track job candidates. The evaluation produces inequality because: merit may penalize candidates with fewer resources due to structural constraints; fit potentially perpetuates social closure and impedes diversity; diversity lacks guidance for implementation and is seldom followed up by inclusion efforts. This study innovatively pinpoints disciplinary and institutional differences in evaluation: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at public universities are driven by bottom‐up needs from minority students, who demand faculty that embodies their identity. At private universities, diversity hiring comes from top‐down demands to signal commitment to DEI. Sociology professors are more sensitive to cumulative (dis)advantages that result in different qualifications among candidates than business professors.