The US Air Force is removing height restrictions for pilots, which will allow more women to serve

Harmeet Kaur, reporting for CNN, describes a recent change that the United States Air Force has made to its pilot selection process. These changes should make the selection process more equitable for women AND maintain the safety of Air Force pilots.

Short version: The USAF has eliminated waivers required for particularly short pilot applicants. Such waivers created another selection burden for women far more often than for men. USAF has created new assessment measures to determine a predict a person's physiological ability to pilot aircraft. 

Long version: 

In the past, anyone who wanted to apply to be a pilot required a special waiver if they were shorter than 5'4". Statistically, this put an additional burden on 44% of women. 

Someone at the USAF was aware of the confidence gap research, in particular, research that finds that women are less likely than men to apply for jobs when they are not 100% qualified. Per the article:

Instead of just using height as a gate-keeper for pilots, USAF will now use a finer-tuned assessment technique that doesn't look at height but does look at a person's physical ability to pilot. From the article:

I think this provides a good example of how an organization can get ahead of selection bias. In this report, it seems that the USAF was very straight forward about how the height/voucher system impacted women at a higher rate than men. They were aware of the historic reasoning behind that assessment decision: Their planes were built to accommodate the average-sized male. They also created an alternative assessment system that would maintain the safety of all USAF pilots while not defaulting to an assessment measure that was biased. 

Using Wegman's to illustrate the antecedents to job satisfaction

I live in NW PA and I love Wegman's grocery stores.

Wegman's employees also love Wegman's, consistently voting the company onto Fortune Magazines 100 Best Companies to Work for the last 23 years. Last year, it ranked number 3 in the nation.

I was happy to find this profile describing how a good employee-supervisor relationship led to Wegman's early adoption of the cauliflower rice craze.  I think it does a great job of illustrating the antecedents of job satisfaction.

Here is the story of one employee, Jody, and the cauliflower rice at Wegmans. It isn't just a story of organizational success, it really is a nice story of how an employee tried to make life better for her customers, supervisors took notice, and everyone won in the end.

While there are many different ways to categorize and organize the antecedents to job satisfaction, here is the list form Levy's Intro Text:

For this activity, I asked my students in "class" (synchronous chat conversation during the Spring 2020 semester) to identify the antecedents that cam through in Jody's story and describe *why* the antecedent applied to the story. They talked about work-family issues, autonomy, supervisor relationships, and task significance, among others.

Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers From Seeing Job Ads. The Federal Government Thinks That’s Illegal

TL:DR: All aspects of recruitment, assessment, promotion, firing are subject to federal laws/EEOC. FB has been violating these laws by allowing organizations to microtarget just younger people with job recruitment ads. The EEOC ruled that such practices are illegal. This whole issue came to light because or ProPublica's reporting and research, and that research used data collection. 


In the original piece by ProPublica, Angwin and Larson reported on large firms using targeted Facebook ads to recruit potential employees. That is legal. However, the firms asked Facebook to limit who saw the ads, and to not show the ads to anyone who was too old. That has been declared illegal by the EEOC.

A basic explanation of what this entails:

They use their I/O words to explain precisely what law was broken:

Later in the article: 

They explain microtargeting, or how ads can be aimed at specific groups at the exclusion of others:

And microtargeting isn't illegal. That's good business, right? It allows organizations to target the most likely customers. In fact, some of the companies argued that targeting likely hires is just like targeting people most likely to use a given service:

I think this would be a great discussion prompt for students. How is advertising for a job different than advertising for a service or product? What laws protect one but not the other?

As a stats instructor, I also think it is interesting that ProPublica stumbled upon this issue while collecting data on Facebook ad placement and politics. And that was a big, communal data collection conducted with the help of ProPublica readers. Because anyone can be a scientist and help with science, my friends.

More on that political placement study here: https://www.propublica.org/article/help-us-monitor-political-ads-online

The follow-up piece has a lot less information about the targeted ads BUT does cite the EEOC and their ruling on the topic. This is helpful when teaching I/O because it shows the ongoing relevance of the EEOC and their role in making legal decisions about new hiring issues.


PS: If you can, support ProPublica. Their investigative reporting is top-notch, in-depth, and considers many different angles. This is not the click-bait reporting we've grown accustomed to. The story I linked above is one of several stories that Propulica has published about this issue.

Crash Course videos for I/O

The Crash Course YouTube channel contains a series of well-edited, well-researched, close-captioned, engaging educational videoes. Like, there are so many terrible-but-well-intended educational videos out there. And there is so much terrible content on the Internet. But Crash Course is the real deal. I use their videos extensively in my Stats class and their Psychology content is also good.

They don't have an I/O psychology series, but they do have a Government and Politics series. This series covers a lot of I/O ground in terms of employment laws and discrimination. So, the content isn't being explained through the lens of I/O psychology, but I think it may stick with your students better to have it emphasized that the ways we try to promote workplace fairness aren't just nice or right, they are the law. Here are three great videos that you could use in I/O:

Sexual Harassment

Affirmative Action

Discrimination

Terrible job interview questions

Apropos of nothing, what's the worst question you've been asked in a job interview and how did you answer it/how do you wish you'd answered it?

— Erin Bartram (@erin_bartram) April 3, 2019

So, this thread brings the cringe. Go see the dumpster fire for yourself, but I'll include a few of the response here:

But it is ALSO a really good way to illustrate two things in I/O:

1) Why structured interviews are better than unstructured interviews. Sure, we have the data to back up this claim but these tweets demonstrate just how terrible interviewers can be.

2) This serves as a great way to review protected classes in the U.S. You could ask your students to match every tweet to the specific protected group this potentially harmed.

Performance appraisal for super heroes

Most Intro to I/O classes cover performance appraisal, which includes employee comparison procedures, like rank-ordering employees for specific purposes, like selecting a new manager.

One engaging, interactive example is to ask your students to create their own tier system for Marvel Comic Univers characters. https://tiermaker.com/create/85mcucharacters-29248 allows you to do just this. Note: They list 115 different characters (!) which is probably overwhelming for students but maybe they could just create a rank order for leadership skills, the capacity to work on a team, ability to persevere in difficult situations, etc.

Note: This example doesn't reflect on my feelings about the characters, I was just playing around with the template to create an example for the blog.

ANOTHER way to discuss rank ordering is by using the COUNTLESS lists of MCU character rankings that already exist.

My favorite example of this are efforts to rank order all of the MCU superheroes. It is an accessible example for our students, better then a dry example from a textbook, AND you can demonstrate how there are all sorts of different criteria one can use for rank ordering since there are some many different lists of MCU heroes based on various characteristics:

Brute Strength:

https://www.thegamer.com/mcu-main-characters-marvel-weakest-strongest-ranked/

Ranked from least to most funny:
https://www.looper.com/151456/the-funniest-mcu-characters-ranked/

Ranked from "Not worth saving" to "If they die, I die"

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ehisosifo1/ranking-marvel-cinematic-universe-characters

Aaron Hernandez and NFL personality assessment.

TL: DR- Aaron Hernandez was an NFL player with a troubled past. He was convicted of murdering his future brother-in-law. He eventually died by suicide. So, needless to say, this is a multifaceted story to use in class. But I do think that it is appropriate to use in an I/O psychology class because it highlights all of the pre-recruitment assessment that potential NFL players completed.

Longer version:

Hernandez is in news again due to the Netflix series about Hernandez, so it might be worth using in class as it is current (again).

Here is the overtly dramatic trailer for the new film about Hernandez:

This is a multi-faceted situation, but it does have an I/O angle. When Hernandez was initially recruited to play professional football, he, as well as all of the other recruits, completed a number of workplace assessment measures (very common with NFL recruits). See this summary of part of the assessment here (source: WSJ):

Here is the whole WSJ article, and here is a PDF version of the same article. Do note: These received a fair amount of media coverage at the time and I'm sure you could find more documentation.


HOW TO USE IN CLASS:

1) The WSJ article references a consulting firm performing the personality assessment. This allows an instructor to remind their students about the different environments in which I/O psychologists work.
2) The NFL uses I/O psychology measures to assess players prior to making very important (for the team), very expensive recruiting decisions. There is even a conference about NFL assessment. CAN YOU IMAGINE THE SWAG?
3) They also mention the Wunderlic. Which is a very respected inventory being used in real life.
4) Criteria: What were the specific personality qualities that the I/O psychologists measure?
5) Criteria: What are the objective criteria that NFL teams are interested in measuring in a recruit?
6) Assessment: Setting a minimum score for a given assessment measure (like the Wonderlic). 

AI in selection: One quick video to introduce the topic in a way that is accessible to under

Are curly fries linked to intelligence? The data shows that might be the case pic.twitter.com/pjdJYDHDaS

— Business Insider (@businessinsider) September 17, 2019

This is a nice, novice starting point for the BIG, big topic of using AI in hiring. I think it hooks the average college student because they have been told for YEARS to maintain a vanilla social media presence. Now? Even innocuous "Likes" can be used to judge them as applicants.

From this starting point, you can go down the rabbit hole with plenty of examples of AI in hiring, related legalities, instances when it has worked out well.

The statistics instructor in me likes the fact that the narrator stresses the fact that all of these relationships are correlational and don't imply causation. As such, this example also fits in a stats class for a very, very basic primer on data mining.

Employee self-assessment, 2nd Grade style

When it comes to self-assessment, it isn't just for middle-management.

My son's teaching sent this home with his weekly Thursday Folder. I love it, as it allows my son to reflect on what went right and what went wrong. 

I also think this could be a fun way to segue into conversations about how more companies are turning away from annual assessments and trying to assess and provide employees with more proactive training. It would also be funny to task college students with coming up with a college student version.

I know this isn't the best picture, but here is a link to a better image of the chart: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/230668812208320550/