Beware of the paradox of meritocracy
Mon 20 February 2012
, LEAP redaktie, LEAP
In an interesting article on the theglasshammer.com Curt Rice explains why it is important to base gender diversity programmes on knowledge instead of ideas and anecdotes. If you think gender diversity is promoted by stressing ‘fairness’ in the company, you might have to rethink and adjust your line of reasoning. A recent complex study, The paradox of meritocracy in organizations, seems to show that explicitly deciding to be fair and explicitly taking action to implement fairness as a corporate value, does not necessarily lead to increased fairness. On the contrary, it suggests that it creates greater imbalances.
Curt Rice, Vice President for Research & Development at the University of Tromsø regularly writes on his interests in issues related to leadership development at academic institutions. In his article Engaging CEO’s in Gender Diversity for theglasshammer.com he states that everything we know about improving gender diversity points to one uniquely important success factor: the interest and investment of an organization’s top leadership.
Rice says: To get CEOs on board, they need to believe in the cause themselves; they need to believe that gender diversity matters. We must provide the best arguments we can so the people at the top will care. Imagine that your CEO is convinced and decides to act, that still isn’t enough if he or she decides - instead of targeting women with complicated and expensive initiatives - to target everyone and eliminate the most basic problems for all employees. The key, the CEO might think, is fairness.
Let’s develop a program that enriches our institutional values, a creative CEO might say. Let’s develop a program that makes it clear to every employee that our company is fair. Decisions are fair. Hiring is carried out fairly. Reviews give fair results. Promotion decisions must be based on fair evaluations. If we could just heighten our awareness of fairness — if we could just act fairly — then we could eliminate all those unfair gender-based impediments along a career path, and diversity and balance will be achieved.
Progressive CEOs might even have rich and liberal conceptions of fairness. They might see the “double shift” problem and think of onsite daycare as a fair initiative. They might see career interruption patterns and conclude that fairness forbids punishing pauses. They might genuinely have the best interests of the institution and all the individual employees at heart.
But there’s troubling research to consider. There’s research suggesting that some ways of emphasizing fairness actually give less of it. There’s research that concludes that explicitly advocating for a meritocracy can in fact undermine the recognition of merit.
Progress requires that we build on research — even when research yields surprising conclusions. Let’s look at one example, from an article called the paradox of meritocracy in organizations.
The experiment analyzed in this article creates an artificial situation in which the participants evaluate files of fictitious employees at fictitious companies. On the basis of those files, they make recommendations about bonuses, promotions and terminations.
The goal is to see what happens when the only difference between two files is the gender of the employee. We learn that men and women with files that are literally identical are treated differently based on the description of the fictitious company.
Some of the made-up companies are described to the subjects as having a core corporate value of emphasizing merit in evaluations. In other cases, this particular value is not mentioned in the description to the subjects.
What is the conclusion?
“When an organization is explicitly presented as meritocratic, individuals in managerial positions favor a male employee over an equally qualified female employee by awarding him a larger monetary reward.”
This is what the authors call the paradox of meritocracy.
Much of their article is devoted to discussing the psychology of this paradox. They note, for example, that when people are led to believe that they are unbiased, fair or objective, they in fact are more likely to behave in biased ways. An individual who is allowed to explicitly disagree with sexist statements before an experimental task will then tend to act in a sexist way, recommending a male over an identical female candidate.
The paradox of meritocracy in organizations is a complex study and we have to think carefully about the conclusions we should draw. It seems, however, that explicitly deciding to be fair and explicitly taking action to implement fairness as a corporate value, does not necessarily lead to increased fairness. On the contrary, research suggests that it creates greater imbalances. And there’s much more than just this one article.
So what do we do with a CEO who wants increased gender balance but proposes a broader, more general strategy? Maybe it’s fairness, maybe something else. Keep talking. Keep building arguments.
But stop building them on anecdotes. Knowledge is our friend in this work, and research is the road to knowledge.
Curt Rice is the Vice President for Research & Development (prorektor for forskning og utvikling) at the University of Tromsø. He writes on his interests in issues related to leadership development at academic institutions online at: http://curt-rice.com.
Read the original article on: http://www.theglasshammer.com/news/2012/02/15/engaging-ceos-in-gender-diversity/#more-8191
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