University of San Diego Retracts Illegal Job Posting Following Karlstack Inquiry

Last week an anonymous whistleblower sent me this discriminatory job posting from the University of San Diego, advertising for a ‘female postdoctoral fellow’:

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This job appeared on an internal message board for the American Physical Society, which I can’t access, because it appears to be for paid-only members.

I emailed the University of San Diego (a private Roman Catholic university with a $652.5 million endowment) leadership and legal counsel for comment, but they did not provide me a quote.

I emailed the professor who posted the job, and she replied:

I am retracting the advertisement. I received funding from Prebys to supplement salary for postdoc with the requirement that they be a woman. But my position is open to everyone. My apologies for the lack of clarification

-- Rae M Robertson-Anderson | she/her/hers

I asked her to define what a ‘‘woman’’ is, but she did not respond.

The charitable interpretation would be I suppose that anyone could apply, but you will only get funding if it is a woman. I find it perverse (and still potentially illegal) that you're allowed to fund researchers based on their gender but not hire based on that. It's a distasteful manipulation of the system.

I find it disgusting that you would post a job behind closed doors (on a private forum) that you *know* you would retract at the first question, you know it is illegal, but you post it anyway because you think you can get away with it. The clandestine nature of this announcement, swiftly retracted upon exposure, betrays an underlying belief in impunity. It is a mockery of legality and ethics.

Transparency, that’s the missing ingredient here. This small story highlights the critical role of investigative journalism in exposing and holding accountable those who engage in such deceptive practices.

This is one of my more succinct stories.

A professor tries to sneak one by, gets caught, backpedals fast.

I will give the last word to my anonymous whistleblower:

I think it is very important that people get called out for doing these blatantly illegal things. I have seen and heard about a lot of this in business schools and the private sector, but usually the Deans are smart enough to do this behind the scenes. For example, I have heard of many schools doing women only searches or a Hispanic search at one school in California. Usually they are not dumb enough to put these criteria in a job posting!

From their own experiences, a lot of foreign faculty who don't know very much about US labor law also think that quotas are not only legal, but mandatory, and are shocked when I explain things to them.

Hopefully if people are called out for doing blatantly illegal things, this will put more pressure on those who do the same behind closed doors. I try to call this stuff out as much as possible, but most people don't and I don't think I have won many friends doing this.

I don't always agree with what you write, and sometimes in my opinion you are too aggressive, but I think you often do good by exposing corruption and immoral behavior. So thanks again for doing that!

— Anonymous whistleblower