Towards Equitable Hiring Practices for Engineering Education Institutions: An Individual-Based Simulation Model

This work presents a modelling and simulation study of academic hiring policies to address equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in an engineering program. An agent-based modelling approach is used to investigate the comparative impacts of various EDI hiring interventions on outputs including the time associated with achieving target representation of underrepresented groups, average value (‘qualification score’) of new hires, and number of positions that the best qualified overrepresented group applicant applies for before being hired. The simulation results demonstrate that the time constants for cultural change are long even with proposals that may be considered radical. Also, the simulation results do not support a common argument that EDI initiatives will sacrifice excellence in faculty hiring.