The False Dichotomy of DEI and Meritocracy

Photo by Zebby Hussain on Unsplash

The first time I heard about Affirmative Action, I thought it was bullshit. I remember the moment when I was applying to colleges, and I asked my mother about it. After she explained what it was, I remember saying something like Well that doesn’t seem fair, the best person should get it, no matter what ethnicity they are. I held that belief firmly until the first real time I experienced bias (or the first time I recognized it).

It was many years ago when I was working at a church, and someone had called me up asking about how much it cost to live where our church was located. I was curious by his questions and tried to answer best as I could - it was a very expensive place to live - but then he told me the reason he was asking me these questions. He was trying to figure out how much salary to give a person he was about to hire - a man that was being hired to the same position as me, just a different department, and who had less experience and lower credentials than I did. I later found out that not only was this person given a higher salary, but he was also given a house.

That moment was the first time when I realized that we needed things like affirmative action, which today would fall under DEI initiatives, because the people who were making the decisions about who to let into their colleges, who to hire, and how much to pay them, were subject to unconscious biases. This meant that in this world it didn't matter that I had a Master's Degree and the person he was hiring had no higher education; it didn’t matter that I had more years job experience than he did and that I had already been working there for several years doing exemplary work; all that mattered was that he was a man and I was a woman and so the expectations were different. A man needed a job and salary that would help him take care of his family, while I guess my job was… what? A hobby? It's ridiculous. In the end it meant that I was barely affording rent, while he was living comfortably. He got a significant leg up in his life and it was only because of his gender.

I realize this is a bit heavy for a Sunday morning and I honestly debated on whether or not I would post it at all, but I started writing this a few months ago after I watched a room full of adults give a standing ovation to a man that declared America would be woke no more. He specifically referred to the destruction of DEI initiatives across the public sector, claiming that we would go back to hiring based on merit. This idea that he is presenting to the American people - the idea that you can either have DEI or Meritocracy - is a false dichotomy. A false dichotomy is when people make you think there are only two choices: you either choose DEI or you choose hiring people (and determining their titles and salaries) based on merit.

First, we can’t go back to meritocracy because we never had it. This is not a matter of opinion or feeling, this is fact. Gender biases and racial biases are woven deeply into our culture of hiring and so having a true meritocracy is much more difficult to achieve. This goes far beyond my one personal example I gave you today and if you are interested in seeing the case studies and research around it, please read the article linked below.

Second, anyone who has ever spent any time researching DEI initiatives and how they help achieve true meritocracy, understands that you cannot have meritocracy without DEI. So, I wonder, these people that vote and make decisions on such things, have they done the research? Do they know what they are talking about? Or are they just blindly following? Are they ignorantly reacting, like I once did many years ago, with the false assumption that we are capable of comparing the merit of two people without letting our biases get in the way?

I don’t know, and I don't expect the average person to know these types of things, so if you feel that this was way over your head, please don't let it be discouraging. It took me years of research and learning to get to the thought process I hold today but as it is front and center in our lives this year, I wanted to provide some more background for those of you who may feel lost but are interested in learning more. I wrote this article a few years ago but it seems the knowledge in it is more needed now than ever before: Brilliance Bias and The Myth of Meritocracy — KristenBHubler.com

Thanks for letting me go deep today. Next week's is probably going to be about Spaghetti sauce, if that helps.