Senior Erica Fuentes said she gets excited when she has a female professor. That’s generally about as diverse as it gets for the government and politics major, aside from those in her U.S. Latino Studies minor, she said.

“It gets mundane when you have the same kind of professor over and over again, and having a diversity of professors would provide you with a diversity of knowledge and perspective,” Fuentes said.

To address this issue, ADVANCE, a program focused on women’s representation in faculty, and the University of Maryland’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion are co-sponsoring the Inclusive Hiring Project to attract more diverse applicants to campus positions.

In 2015, 34 percent of faculty primarily focused in instruction and 53 percent of faculty primarily focused in research were non-white, according to a report from the university’s Office of Institutional Research, Planning and Assessment. Of university staff, slightly more than 50 percent are non-white, and 55 percent are female, according to the report.

In fall 2015, 46 percent of undergraduates were students of color and 52 percent were female.

“For a lot of first-generation [college students] or students of color, it’s exciting to see a professor that looks like you in the classroom,” Fuentes said. “Having a professor that is from similar backgrounds … is extremely motivational.”

Building a diverse faculty can be much more difficult than building a diverse student body, Chief Diversity Officer Kumea Shorter-Gooden said, because so few people are qualified to be a faculty member in the first place.

“You have to have someone who has a Ph.D., generally, and wants to put that to work in the academy,” Shorter-Gooden said. “So it’s a smaller and smaller pipeline.”

The Colleges of Arts and Humanities, Behavioral and Social Sciences and Computer, Math and Natural Sciences, as well as the schools of agriculture, education and architecture, will be participating in the program pilot, Shorter-Gooden said.

“A major priority of the college continues to be having a diverse faculty, a faculty that represents the state of Maryland,” said Gregory Ball, behavioral and social sciences dean. “We want to have our faculty look like our students, ideally.”

Ball said he thinks his college has been doing well in increasing faculty diversity, even before the hiring project. Six out of 14 hires last year were underrepresented minorities, he said.

“I’m hoping to continue to build a community of diverse scholars that will lead to a positive feedback effect and make our college more welcoming to students with different backgrounds,” Ball said. “That will in turn provide an atmosphere that the faculty will like.”

In the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences specifically, 41 percent of students enrolled in fall 2015 belonged to a minority population, while three percent were international, according to an IRPA college profile.

Part of the Inclusive Hiring initiative includes implicit bias training with search committee members, said KerryAnn O’Meara, ADVANCE director.

“We want to take advantage of all that has been learned by many of our Big Ten peers, and also by social science evidence that suggests that certain strategies are more effective than others in … making sure that we’re doing everything possible to grow the talent pool,” O’Meara said.

Reference letters written about male scholars and female scholars who are similar in publications or accomplishments often sound different, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Men’s brilliance, intellectual capacity and acumen are often flagged, said Shorter-Gooden, while for women, their interpersonal capacity is often highlighted.

“‘She’s an affable, hard worker,'” Shorter-Gooden said. “Those differences can make a difference in how those candidates are being viewed, so being aware of some of those biases is important.”

University search committees also receive a data card including information about the diversity of past search pools, as well as diversity of recent doctoral students so committee members “understand what the pipeline is,” O’Meara said. The cards also include diversity of faculty at other institutions, she added.

The way job descriptions are written can also deter women from applying. A posting searching for “a strong, competitive individual” is far less likely to attract women to apply than a posting searching for someone who will be “collaborative,” “engaging” or “work cooperatively,” Shorter-Gooden said.

“We’re hoping [the initiative] positively influences the diversity of who applies, who is being qualified for search committees within that pool, who is chosen for the short list, who is offered the job and who says yes,” O’Meara said.

CORRECTION: Due to a reporting error, a previous version of this story incorrectly identified Erica Fuentes as Erica Puentes. This story has been updated.