Women in The Workplace and The Myth of Meritocracy

"The world of humanity is possessed of two wings: the male and the female. So long as these two wings are not equivalent in strength, the bird will not fly." --- 'Abdu'l-Bah

The year is 2019, yet we are still seeing so many women being the first and/or only woman to (insert a notable achievement here) in a multitude of fields. The field of economic sciences is one good example of how this phenomenon plays out. Indonesia, which celebrated the 74th anniversary of its independence day last August, has only had one female Minister of Finance so far. We also have heard of Esther Duflo who recently won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, making her one of the only two women to receive the prize since it was first awarded in 1969.

On one hand, it serves as an evidence that women's capabilities are now vastly recognized. On the other hand, this tells a history of how women have been oppressed for so many centuries. Up until now, for every step a woman makes, her male colleagues take possibly a tenfold of that.

Before we proceed to further discussions, there are three fundamental questions to be asked in the process of achieving gender equality. Firstly, what is our progress and are we progressing fast enough? What can we do to catalyse the process? Last but not least, what challenges are there to be tackled?

The Status Quo

To answer the first question, let us take a look at the data. The Global Gender Gap Report 2018 by World Economic Forum predicted that children born today will be able to see gender equality in Western Europe, South Asia, as well as in Latin America and the Caribbean within the next 61 to 74 years. For the other parts of the world, things are not looking as good. In East Asia and the Pacific the time needed to close the gap is almost triple that of Western Europe's. Overall, the gender gap has been reduced by 0.03% from 2017 to 2018 and by 3.6% since 2006 when the annual report was first released.

Based on the report, the equality index consists of four subindexes. Global gender parity in two of them, Educational Attainment and Health and Survival, has almost been achieved with small gaps remaining to be filled. Gender disparity in the two other subindexes are far from being insignificant. It will take respectively 202 and 107 more years for the world to finally seal its wide-open economic and political dimensions of gender gap.

In the workplace, as an indicator of the Economic Participation and Opportunity subindex, women are still facing substantial barriers in assuming leadership roles and its evident lies in the data that shows how only 34% of global leaders are women. This raises concern because the gender gap in labor market participation and technical roles has mostly been bridged. Other than the professional disparities, the gender gap in terms of wage and earned income must also be paid attention.

The aforementioned statistic might be disheartening as we will not even be alive to see the event unfolding. However, instead of giving in to pessimism, the fight to free women from oppression must be continued by finding ways to accelerate the process. Such change will only be possible if a just system exists to ensure that women are not discriminated based on preconceived opinions and stereotypes against their gender.

The Myth of Meritocracy

Meritocracy, by definition, is a social system in which "merit or talent is the basis for sorting people into positions and distributing rewards" (Scully, 1997 as cited in Castilla & Benard, 2010). When we talk about equality, 'meritocracy' seems to be one of the words that have the power to restore people's faith in the possibility of an equal world.

Little do they know, such a system is built upon complex factors that cannot be disentangled so easily to reveal a person's true quality should they be stripped of their inherent privileges. Keep in mind that this is not meant to wholly discredit those who won the life lottery even before they were born because there were some cases of them not living up to what is expected of them.

Meritocracy as a theory is flawed. In practice, meritocracy has failed women in the workplace. In an article published by Cornell University, Castilla & Benard (2010) found that in an organization that prides itself on meritocracy, managers ironically show greater bias in favor of men over equally performing women in translating employee performance evaluations into monetary rewards and other key career outcomes i.e., hiring, promotion, termination. They called this 'the paradox of meritocracy'.

The paradox is created by two mechanisms. The first explains how an organizational culture that prides itself on meritocracy may amplify bias by convincing managers that they are unbiased, which in turn discourages them from double-checking their own behaviors for signs of prejudice. This mechanism happens through the role of moral credentials: "individuals are more prone to express prejudiced attitudes when they feel that they have established their moral credentials as a non-prejudiced person" (Monin & Miller, 2001 as cited in Castilla & Benard, 2010).

Secondly, if managers believe that the members of organizations are unbiased, then the fairness of their actions are less likely to be questioned, thus they are more likely to let prejudice cloud their decisions. As we can see, the relationship between meritocracy and equality is not necessarily deterministic. Therefore, we must seek other means that work in tandem with meritocracy to empower women. 

Women in The Workplace

In an abbreviated version of her article published in the Harvard Business Review, Melinda Gates and her team identified three critical strategies to propel gender equality in the workplace. The first two are quite intuitive; dismantling the barriers (i.e., stereotypes, sexual harassment and discrimination, and caregiving responsibilities) that have pinned women under oppression for hundreds of years and hinder their professional advancements and exerting external pressure to the private sector to join in the movement.

The third one interestingly enough stems from the idea that bias cannot be eliminated, but they can be disrupted in certain ways that are favorable for women. Iris Bohnet, a behavioral economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, is the architect behind this concept. One case that shows how tweaking the design of the workplace benefits women is the "bundle decisions" used in nominating multiple, instead of only one, names to be a Nobel Prize winner in 2018. This way, women and people of color are more likely to appear as the nominees and eventually, as the Laureates.

Her earlier research also indicated that informing managers of their past pattern of promotion by gender can alter the way they hire in the future. In other words, it is a way of helping them to acknowledge their bias and change their behaviors in accordance with the aim of reducing the gender disparity in the workplace especially for leadership roles as well as wage and income. In addition, blind auditions would also help stakeholders to judge candidates based on their qualities and not their genders.

Disrupting bias through design tweaking is only one of the myriad of ways to help us achieve gender equality. In truth, there are still a lot of layers of the glass ceiling that has to be broken. Though we may not live to see the day where women are no longer addressed as the second-class Homo sapiens, reduced down to mere companion for men, and deprived of the rights to thrive like their male counterparts; we all must collaborate to make sure that that day will come and that it will come sooner.

by Rosalia Marcha Violeta | Economics 2018 | Staff of Studies Division Kanopi FEB UI 2019

References

World Economic Forum. (2018). The Global Gender Gap Report 2018 (pp. 3-18)

Castilla, E., & Benard, S. (2010). The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 55(4), 543-676. doi: 10.2189/asqu.2010.55.4.54