Meritocracy not simply a matter of good intentions, MIT Sloan faculty explain at diversity summit
Achieving meritocracy—the idea that people advance in work and life based on ability—is complicated. Well-intentioned efforts to implement meritocracy in schools and the workplace can actually have the opposite effect, MIT Sloan professors explained at the third-annual MIT Institute Diversity Summit.
At the event, MIT Sloan professors Emilio Castilla and Denise Lewin Loyd presented research that details how even simple attempts to instill meritocracy and inclusion in an organization can become fraught with complexity.
Castilla discussed what he calls “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations,” whereby promoting an institution as a meritocracy can actually have some “unintended consequences of increased bias.”
In some of his experiments, he found that managers who were embedded in organizations that emphasized meritocracy actually showed greater bias against women, for example.
“The pursuit of meritocracy is more difficult than it appears,” he said. “We need to define what meritocracy means.”
The concept of meritocracy in the workplace is even more complicated when considering the hiring process, said Loyd, who conducts research on diversity within groups. For example, if there is only one woman on a six-person hiring committee, and that woman favors hiring the one qualified female candidate, she is faced with acting neutral, advocating for her gender, or having to come to terms with the “favoritism threat,” the perception that her colleagues will suspect she only wants to hire a woman.
“She is afraid of being viewed as ‘playing favorites,’” Loyd explained. In her research, Loyd discovered that women would sometimes actually rate qualified female workplace applicants lower, because they are so concerned about the favoritism threat.