Dr. Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein, PhD, linguistic anthropologist and media research lead at Knology shares a few insights on letter of recommendation best practices. You can view her on-demand presentation, Inclusive Recommendations: Writing, Requesting and Assessing Them on the Advance Learning Center.
When soliciting letters of recommendations, first, don’t ask until you are down to a few serious candidates. There are equity considerations at play: one must expend ‘relationship capital’ to ask for letters. Second, the clearer the expectations are, the more comparable the letters received. From an equity perspective, you want the letters to be relatively easy to compare. At some point, a more equitable process requires agreement across a broader professional field. If the entire field of, say, chemical engineering has a standard letter format, that’s a win for both equity and for the recommenders’ time.
If you are asked to write a letter of recommendation one of the biggest things to avoid is “damning with faint praise.” Why are you mentioning that someone is a good team player, or well-spoken, or organized? It implies that you can’t say anything stronger — and frankly, all of those are table stakes for being a professional adult. They also get mentioned disproportionately often in letters for minoritized people. During the webinar we’ll compare sample letters to highlight some more common equity issues that come up in letters of recommendations and we’ll also discuss strategies for writing more inclusively.
Reviewing recommendation letters can reveal biases as well. Where possible, reviewing independently of gender (e.g. by substituting in all ‘they’ pronouns) can help — for example, we’re immersed in the message that ambition is a good trait in men and a less good trait in the rest of us. On the other hand, that can make it harder to see bias on the writers’ part and correct for it. So a lot of it comes down to giving really clear directions before you receive them.
You can viewDr. Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein, PhD on-demand presentation, Inclusive Recommendations: Writing, Requesting and Assessing Them on the Advance Learning Center.
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