lowering the bar = a racist, sexist, and ableist narrative with no basis in reality that represents diversifying hiring pipelines, attracting candidates from underrepresented groups, and supporting them in the workplace as “lowering the bar” by hiring less-qualified individuals

The meritocracy myth and the “lowering the bar” narrative are big barriers to inclusion. This study frames the struggle as “merit vs. the diversity imperative” and identifies it as one of four primary organizational challenges to DEIB.

Inclusive cultures include everyone. Focusing on only certain genders, races, or backgrounds hurts both employees and companies themselves. Over the course of a history of exclusion and bias, amazingly talented people from underrepresented groups have been shut out. Including all people is easier, more profitable, and less legally risky than building a two-tiered system of inclusion and exclusion. Unfortunately, the meritocracy myth continues to persist, and reforming systems built on meritocratic ideals is often denigrated as “lowering the bar.” Companies blame the pipeline and unconscious bias for lack of diversity without addressing their own internal failures to be inclusive. We find these behaviors racist and sexist.

Defining culture

Technical organizations often struggle with the idea that if they diversify their hiring pipelines, attract candidates from underrepresented groups, and support them in the workplace, this will lead to “lowering the bar” or hiring less-qualified individuals. This assertion has no basis in reality, and is inherently both racist and sexist as it assumes that candidates from underrepresented groups must, by definition, not meet the hiring qualifications.

Employee lifecycle

Though startups are making an effort to implement diversity improvement strategies, the reality is that most are taking limited, potentially harmful actions, including one-off training, blaming the pipeline, using language like “lowering the bar,” and describing the current state of the tech industry as a “meritocracy.” Unfortunately, we have seen tech culture become even more exclusive and less diverse over the last five years.

About Project Include

Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush originally coined the phrase. It refers to the fact that the left’s approach to dealing with minorities — especially in the Black community — is based on the notion that they cannot achieve success in American society.

This approach is predicated on the widely held racist beliefs of White people, that Black people-to varying degrees based on skin tone-will inevitably underperform, thus lowering the bar. While the impact of such belief systems is pervasive, contributing to the vicious and expansive cycle of oppression: underestimation, underrepresentation, under-compensation, etc., when BIPOC meet and/or exceed this “bar” time and time again, they are seen as an anomaly, an individual exception to the rule: The Token.

Black Excellence and the Low Expectations of White Supremacy — Incluu

Meritocracy is a myth for BIPOC, and the consequence for believing otherwise is neither “soft” nor a departure from other types of systemic racism. As BIPOC, we must constantly toggle between being seen and acknowledged for our competency, appreciated and respected by our peers, but not too much lest we become a threat. We mustn’t be lazy, or complacent, but also, not too demanding at the risk of being perceived as “angry”. We are expected to reaffirm White mediocrity as the standard at all costs: to free whiteness from the guilt and shame of not achieving more than those they persistently deem capable of so much less.

Black Excellence and the Low Expectations of White Supremacy — Incluu

What happens in a world in which white people begin to make dubious claims about how diversity initiatives disadvantage them and take away positions that they are qualified for and entitled to? You have a generation of white men who engage in grievance politics subjecting us all to their rage and their Trump. What happens if these same arguments undergird claims to the presidency on the left? Unfortunately, Sanders’ progressivism does not keep him or his supporters from making the same kinds of problematic merit-based claims to presidential employment that white men in every other industry make.

Why Elizabeth Warren’s Gender Matters in the 2020 Election | Time

These voters also choose never to think about the ways that merit-based arguments of the same sort are deployed by corporate America or the halls of academia to wall women and racial minorities out of access to great jobs and organizational leadership opportunities. Anyone who has ever served on a committee charged with hiring candidates who bring some diversity to a place understands how things go when the white guy who meets all the criteria (because he has had structural access to all the privileges that would help him meet all the criteria) is up against a promising woman or person of color who is very good but falls down in a few categories. Or conversely she’s the best, but the standards as written and understood make hiring her seem like too much of a risk. Hiring committees often struggle with what feels to them like the fundamental unfairness of allowing a candidate’s diversity to put them over the top. Many (white) members of these committees see this as a sullying of (a mythic) meritocracy in a way that disadvantages white men. But first, they have to believe that the man in question received all his qualifications on the merits and not because of structural privileges. I expect people on the progressive and radical left, those who claim to understand how intersectionality works, to know better, but they aren’t acting like they do.

Why Elizabeth Warren’s Gender Matters in the 2020 Election | Time

Stimpunks Foundation

Lowering the Bar

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