Brilliance Bias and The Myth of Meritocracy
Why Just Hiring the Right Person is More Complicated Than We Think
Have you ever heard someone say something like - it shouldn’t matter what gender someone is, let’s just hire the best person for the job. Or maybe it was something like - we're trying to be more diverse and inclusive, but we just don’t have enough qualified candidates. These are statements that I used to say too because it seems perfect. All that should matter is getting the most qualified person. Period. This idea is called meritocracy: “the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability.” Over the years, as I learned more, I started to realize that line of thinking was reductive because unconscious bias makes true meritocracy a lot harder to achieve than we realize.
But I'm not biased.
Did I read your mind? Unfortunately, research has shown that we all have a little bias and denying it just makes it worse:
"Studies have shown that a belief in your own personal objectivity or a belief that you are not sexist makes you less objective and more likely to behave in a sexist way. Men (women were not found to exhibit this bias) who believe they are objective in hiring decisions are more likely to hire a male applicant than an identically described female applicant. And in organizations that are explicitly presented as meritocratic, managers favor male employees over equally qualified female employees." - Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data bias in a world designed for men
I remember a few years ago I was playing with my niece, who was six years old at the time. I can’t remember what I did exactly, maybe it was lifting something heavy or doing some sort of “strength” activity. But when I finished, I looked at her and jokingly put my arms up to show my muscles. I hammed it up for a little bit, intentionally trying to make her laugh, but her response surprised me. It wasn’t how I was acting or the look on my face she found silly, it was the fact that I was doing it as a woman. She looked at me and said “Tíaaaaaaa” – dragging it out in that way kids do when the adult in their presence does something embarrassing - “Why are you acting like a boy?”
I was floored. She is raised by people that would never teach her that strength is just for boys, and yet she still has learned it. Strength, in her little young mind, is already starting to be associated with men. If someone were to ask her to choose the strongest person in the room, who would she choose, I wonder? Would this unintentional bias lead her to immediately choose a boy instead of a girl? Would she be unable to see other factors at play (i.e., age, height, muscles, etc.) because her mind is automatically trained to assume a boy would be the best for the job? This impact will only grow as she grows, and it will not be limited to strength.
The Myth of Meritocracy
My path to learning about all this was kickstarted years ago when I read Caroline Criado Perez's book Invisible Women: Data bias in a world designed for men. In her chapter titled The Myth of Meritocracy, Perez opens with the famous study on the Phil Harmonic Orchestra. For years, orchestras claimed to hire the very best for their seats. With a low turnover rate, the exclusivity of landing a seat on the Phil Harmonic will be for many people the highlight of their life. Yet for years this highlight was dominated by men. I'm sure anyone on the hiring board would have claimed that the women just weren't good enough. As a woman in IT, I hear it all the time. We just didn't have enough qualified candidates. Gender diversity in STEM is getting better but we're just not there yet. Perhaps those statements are true, or perhaps we aren't as objective as we think we are.
In the early 1970s someone finally had enough, and they sued. The response by the Phil Harmonic was to institute blind auditions. Rather than meeting each candidate, a screen would create a barrier. Like The Voice, this allowed judges to choose candidates based solely on their ability to play. While I will not pretend that this process is perfect (see: To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions), the results were staggering. Just 10 years into the new process the proportion of women grew from a statistical 0% to 10%. Today, or more specifically by November 22, 2022 when Javier Hernandez wrote this article, women outnumber the men.
Due to these changes, the Phil Harmonic is a true meritocracy. Unfortunately, as Perez points out, it is the outlier:
"For the vast majority of hiring decisions around the world, meritocracy is an insidious myth. It is a myth that provides cover to institutional, white male bias. And dishearteningly, it is a myth that proves remarkably resistant to all the evidence going back decades that shows it up as the fantasy it most certainly is. If we want to kill this myth off, we're clearly going to have to do more than just collect data."
Brilliance Bias
Young girls begin life believing they can be anything. In another study I learned from Perez, young girls were asked to participate in an activity that was only for "really, really smart" kids. When the participants were just five years old, they jumped at the chance to do the activity. Then, when they turned six, they no longer were interested. So, what's the change? Why did one year of school impact how smart a little girl thought she was?
In a different study, children were asked to draw scientists. When they began school, the percentages of male to female scientists were roughly equal. As they progressed through their education, drawings of male scientists began to outnumber the female scientists. According to Perez, "By the age of 14, children are drawing 4 times as many male scientists as female scientists." Again, what’s the change?
In yet another study, adult participants were shown pictures of male and female science faculty at elite US universities. They discovered that the appearance of the man in the picture has no impact on the likelihood that he would be judged as a scientist. "When it came to women however, the more stereotypically feminine they looked, the less likely it was that people would think they were a scientist." Whether we are five or fifty, it seems that the stories we are being told and the images we are seeing as we go through school and life, are subtly teaching all women that brilliance does not belong to us; at the rare occasion when it does, we need to sacrifice our femininity to earn it.
Many years ago, my sister – a Doctor of epidemiology at a well-known university - dropped my then two-year-old nephew off at his preschool. When she arrived, she saw they had all colored a picture with their name on it. At closer examination she discovered that all the boys in the classroom were given pictures of doctors, whereas all the girls in the classroom were given pictures of nurses. She asked the day care workers the very simple question – girls can’t be doctors too? It was clear the teachers had not intended to create this separation or perpetuate these stereotypes. And yet, it still happened. It happens all the time because brilliance bias - the tendency for people to think of brilliance as being a male trait - is deeply engrained into our society. I’m sure the images they printed out from some free curriculum website only gave them male doctors and female nurses. Furthermore, the biases they learned throughout their own educations may have left them to believe that these stereotypes are true. As a volunteer on the first aid squad, I can tell you firsthand that they are not.
When I walk into a hospital, I have no idea who is a doctor and who is a nurse. The numbers today, at least where I live, are completely mixed. The data shows it, and I can see it with my eyes; it is the norm and yet our children are still coloring male doctors and female nurses. This means we grow up judging women as not being brilliant enough to be doctors or judging men as not being compassionate enough to be nurses. That is why learning about bias matters. If we don’t recognize it and question it, then we continue to unintentionally teach current and future generations these false truths.
Where do we go from here?
We keep learning and we keep challenging the status quo. If we want to create a world where we truly can choose the best person for the job, we need more people to be aware that these biases exist. Real change happens when at least one person has enough conviction to step back and say something about this isn’t right, and enough information to convince everyone else to do something about it. This article was not exhaustive to say the least, but I hope it added a few tools to your fight-the-bias-toolbox so you can help stop the pattern of assumptions that women aren’t the strong, wise, and powerful contributors that they are.
Check out all posts related to Women in the Workplace:
