Correction to: Nature Human Behaviour https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01495-4, published online 5 December 2022.

In the version of this Comment initially published, reference 2 (Griffin et al.) appeared with incorrect page numbers and publication date and has now been corrected. In the “Demographic parity” section, the first sentence has been revised to read “Decades of work across policy and the social sciences have established the normative importance and empirical benefits of demographic diversity in higher education”, to focus on diversity rather than parity. A reference (Bennett, J., Lattuca, L., Redd, K. & York, T. Strengthening Pathways to Faculty Careers in STEM: Recommendations for Systemic Change to Support Underrepresented Groups (Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, 2020)) that did not directly support the point being made in the Comment has been removed. These changes have been made to the HTML and PDF versions of the comment.