The meritocracy myth
Jack and Larry
Recently a Wall Street Journal article described what I’ll call a “Larry Summers” moment for women in business. Namely, Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, spoke to a bunch of women about how if they work hard enough they’ll be appreciated and get ahead. From the article:
He had this advice for women who want to get ahead: Grab tough assignments to prove yourself, get line experience, and embrace serious performance reviews and the coaching inherent in them.
“Without a rigorous appraisal system, without you knowing where you stand…and how you can improve, none of these ‘help’ programs that were up there are going to be worth much to you,” he said. Mr. Welch said later that the appraisal “is the best way to attack bias” because the facts go into the document, which both parties have to sign.
Just as in the case of Larry Summer’s now-famous 2005 speech about women in science and math, a bunch of women left Welch’s talk in frustration.
There is no such thing as a meritocracy
Having been in academic mathematics and a quant in a hedge fund, I’d guess I’ve experienced what comes closest in many people’s minds as the closest to a meritocratic system. But my experience is that it’s anything but, even in these highly quantitative settings.
Instead, as it probably is everywhere, the job environment is a huge social game where it matters, a lot, what kind of priorities you demonstrate and what kind of other signals you give off or respond to. We don’t expect people to play golf and smoke cigars in academia but caring about teaching, or worse, getting a teaching award, can be the kiss of death.
I’m not saying that your personal efforts don’t matter at all, because they do, and you do need to produce stuff, and at a certain rate, but even “personal efforts” are first of all received in the context of a social order (i.e. the perceived importance of your efforts at the very least is a social invention), and second of all they’re are not really personal – one frames the questions one answers with the help of the community, so it’s important you have a good connection and social acceptance in that community (i.e. access to the experts).
Business in more generality is even less meritocratic- there’s a specific requirement that you must “play well with others,” which is absent from academics (mercifully). This means that instead of being an implicit social game, it’s been made very explicit. This is where people promote their work, take credit for others’ work, learn to say what people want to hear, etc. The performance review is a circle-jerk event for such empty-headed manipulations, which makes it particularly ironic that Welch suggested women take the criticism in an appraisal so seriously.
In my experience, it is unbelievably useful for these social games to have an alpha personality, which just kind of means you assume you’re in charge even when it’s not explicitly a situation where someone’s in charge. People respond to such personalities on a chemical level and there’s really nothing a so-called meritocratic system can do about that.
In other words, I’m not holding my breath for a truly meritocratic system. It’s just not what humans evolved for. Let’s acknowledge that and work on how to make the system responsive to good ideas anyway (whatever the system is).
Successful people want to believe that there is such a thing as meritocracy
This begs the question, why do people like Jack Welch and Larry Summers hold on so tight to the myth of meritocracy? My theory is that it serves a two-fold goal: as advertisement for new people and as a validation of the winners in the system.
People want to feel like they are entering a level playing field then the best thing you can do is advertise it as a meritocracy, because it’s human nature to think that you’re better than average. So everyone wants to enter such a field, assuming they will rise to the top.
At the same time, the `winners’ of the social game want desperately to think they did amazing stuff in order to be so successful. They hold on to the myth of meritocracy as a religious belief, and it is pure dogma by the time they reach upper management. This plays into another part of human nature where we discount luck and the infrastructure that led to our success and take it as a sign of our personal choices. Lots of people in finance in general suffer from this diseased mindset but actually anyone who is high enough up in their respective `meritocratic system’ does too.
That’s my simple explanation for why these guys can go in front of a bunch of women and be so unbelievably tone-deaf. They are true believers, because their entire egos are built on this belief, and it doesn’t matter how much counter-evidence is presented to them, even in the form of humans in the room with them.
One last thought. If I saw people leaving a room in disgust when I was giving a talk, I imagine I’d be slightly aghast- I might even pause and ask them what’s wrong. But I guess that’s because I’m not alpha enough.
mathbabe 
In the early 60’s my adviser told me that when people leave during your talk it’s because (a) they are looking for the restroom, (b) your presentation is over their head or (c) they discovered they are in the wrong room.
Although merit plays a part in occupational advancement it seems to account for far less variance than most people would expect. Flat ass good luck and the buddy system are much larger contributors.
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“caring about teaching, or worse, getting a teaching award, can be the kiss of death.”
I’m surprised by this statement since you taught at Barnard-a liberal arts college. Maybe because of Barnard’s affiliation with Columbia or maybe because the school places an unusual emphasis on research productivity for a liberal arts college, but I imagine the vast majority of places like Amherst, Swarthmore, et al place a premium on a commitment to undergraduates and teaching over research. These types of schools seem to offer an alternative to the academic who cares about teaching more than the publish or perish rat race.
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The gold standard for meritocracy is the modern audition process for most orchestras, where the jury cannot see the applicants at any point; they are judged completely on their sound. The introduction of this blinding process rapidly transformed orchestras from male-dominated to relatively equal in composition.
It’s of course more difficut to come up with an equivalent blinding process in academia or business, but it’s sad that I haven’t heard of any such attempts. I consider myself pretty smart, but it’s embarrassing how much easier it is for me to “make a good impression” as a clean-cut, well-educated, extroverted American white male than if I were equally smart but deviated from that stereotype.
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One minor example from academia: in some disciplines journal refereeing is done double-blind; that is, not only does the author not know who the referee is, but the referee is not told the identity of the author. Now of course the referee can often make a good guess as to who the author is, but in disciplines where one doesn’t widely disseminate results prior to publication at least the referee can’t be certain. (This would not work in mathematics since one would almost certainly have seen on the arXiv any manuscript one was asked to referee.)
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An interesting post, Cathy.
Anoher (rather silly) example of mericracy seems to be success in certain individual sports such as tennis…
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I feel your post is missing some perspective and I would like to point out a foundational problem. Let me begin by acknowledging who I am. I have never been in the business world. I suspect I might agree with a lot of your criticisms if I had more experience. I have been in academic mathematics with a mixture of success and failure. I could not have persevered without a belief in the “meritocracy myth”, that however much politics might exist in my profession, substance can always trump it.
Your post begins with outrage at Jack Welch’s idea for fighting sex discrimination through careful documentation of “merit.” Let me share my own view that sex discrimination is bad. I believe this because I think of sex discrimination as being unjust. (Not socially unjust mind you, just unjust in the ordinary individual sense of just.) I believe that there is some abstract concept of “merit” and that when sex discrimination is practiced against (for example) women, then those women have their roles usurped by less “meritorious” men. Fighting against such injustices is a noble cause. There is an intrinsic notion of “merit” and all discrimination should take place on that basis and that basis alone.
But let’s say you’re right and we have to discard “merit.” No one proves a theorem except
at the expense of those who have not proved it. The whole mass of humanity will stumble
around and prove the same theorems regardless of who gets the jobs, and what happens after is a dirty political game where alpha males such as myself take the credit.
What reason then is there to oppose sex discrimination? Why is it bad? Why is it worse than whatever basis on which you propose to discriminate? How can one be just without a concept of abstract justice?
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Here’s another school of thought: meritocracy is hard because measuring merit is hard. Yes, even in academia 🙂 More precisely, it’s not impossible to come up with metrics on which there is general agreement and then having subjects rigorously evaluated and scored.
It just takes time, money, and commitment, all of which are in notoriously short supply despite the importance supposedly attached to the accurate, impartial evaluations upon which a true meritocracy depends.
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Merit, or the ability to do the work, counts for something, but I’ve never been employed anywhere — or involved in anything — where it counted for much. The minimum competence has always seemed exceedingly low.
Success, or maybe recognition is a better word, is an emotional affair, and human beings make odd judgments about everything, including performance, and who to hire. As such, racial bias, sex bias, ethnic bias are often important. All sorts of superficial stuff comes into play, like height and looks and speaking voice.
We were watching that PBS Frontline show on Wall Street, and in the early parts, a number of J.P. Morgan people were interviewed. They were all women, about the same age, who shared a look. I’ll bet the same guy made the hiring decisions. He (assuming it was a man) had found a bunch of women with math or science degrees whom he liked looking at.
Meeting performance is a lot more important job performance. Some people have an instinct for grabbing the attention of distracted and overwhelmed bosses. Some are just very fleet afoot for grabbing credit and avoiding blame.
There are various extra factors. Sometimes judgments can be made on the numbers alone — like sales or trading profits. In academia it gets weird. A paper is often accepted on the identity of the author — usually transparent even in double blind reviewing. Some swear that incomprehensible papers fare well because the reviewers don’t know enough to shoot them down. Maybe it does all boil down to luck.
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Hi! I couldn’t agree more. What I see in the technology business environments I have spent 15 years in is a meritocracy based on “objective” merits that are anything but objective and are pretty clearly stacked in favor of a particular type of personality. I wind up giving *some* of the same advice though.
I *do* think that “Grab tough assignments to prove yourself” is something that does work more often than not, but this assumes the person has the ability to even do so in their structure and that this is encouraged or even allowed.
I also think that even there, how that “grab” is perceived is different for men and women. When women make that grab, they are often seen as being too ambitious, bucking the chain of command, etc. Or, on the other end, they are often taken for granted and it is assumed that they must not have had anything else to do and maybe it wasn’t that tough after all.
And at the end of the day, this also assumes that it is right and proper for a structure to be in place which requires you to *grab* tough/interesting work to prove yourself, as opposed to it being given to you. There is competition inherent in the foundational world-view behind that statement. Why so much competition? We are supposed to be on the same team and competing with other businesses, right? What about the woman who is happy to crush any assignment she is given but simply doesn’t want to have to compete for the assignments that will “prove” her abilities? Why must she step so far out of her comfort zone just in order for the company that pays her to make use of the talents they are paying her to use?
The “meritocracy” seems to measure a very narrow range of behavior and calls that “merit”.
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Cathy, I agree with you that meritocracy at least as discussed in politics is a fiction. However, who says that “playing well with others” isn’t in fact the merit worth measuring?
In mathematics the merit is supposed to be intelligence or productivity and in trading the merit is money in the door. But in many lines of work, groups and only groups can accomplish Big Tasks. In that case it makes sense to reward those who effectively function best in groups rather than brilliant introverts.
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Of course it is, but I guess my point is that it’s not what actually happens in a review. Or rather, the standards are different depending on whether the reviewer wants to reward you or not, which in turn depends on how well you play the game. It’s a political process. If anyone ever writes down a list of requirements for such things, they are lying. Most people don’t bother.
One thing I forgot to mention about reviews, is that it’s the biggest opportunity in the year for assigning blame.
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(or if your job is selling or dealmaking, interpersonal prowess is again the desired attribute to base a meritocracy on)
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cf. this follow-up article by the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303879604577410520511235252.html
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