I spent 30 years in the so-called meritocracies of open source and Silicon Valley. When you look around and see almost exclusively white men, your meritocracy is self-evident nonsense. ‪In a structurally racist, sexist, and ableist society, hiring strictly from credentialist pipelines is exclusionary, unethical, and bad for business.‬ Overcoming diversity and inclusion pipeline problems requires adopting structural ideology in education and work. Do more than blame pipelines, and stop propagating deficit ideologies and meritocracy and bootstrap myths. These myths are mental health destroying gaslighting writ large. The meritocracy myths fuels internalized ableism, racism, and sexism.

The research is considered the first evidence linking preteens’ emotional and behavioral outcomes to their belief in meritocracy, the widely held assertion that individual merit is always rewarded.

“Students who are told that things are fair implode pretty quickly in middle school as self-doubt hits them,” he said, “and they begin to blame themselves for problems they can’t control.”

Study: Poor Kids Who Believe in Meritocracy Suffer – The Atlantic

When I say that meritocracy is a myth, therefore, I am mainly referring to this problem of social equity.

Howlett, Zachary M.. Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China (p. 19). Cornell University Press.

In short, the two sides of the myth of meritocracy point to a contradiction. Despite the false promise of a socially equalizing effect (the first myth of meritocracy), the Gaokao recruits the majority in China into a belief in individual merit (the second myth of meritocracy).

Howlett, Zachary M.. Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China (pp. 22-23). Cornell University Press.

Meritocracy justifies the status quo.

The findings build upon a body of literature on “system justification”—a social-psychology theory that believes humans tend to defend, bolster, or rationalize the status quo and see overarching social, economic, and political systems as good, fair, and legitimate. System justification is a distinctively American notion, Godfrey said, built on myths used to justify inequities, like “If you just work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps … it’s just a matter of motivation and talent and grit.” Yet, as she and her colleagues discovered, these beliefs can be a liability for disadvantaged adolescents once their identity as a member of a marginalized group begins to gel—and once they become keenly aware of how institutional discrimination disadvantages them and their group.

Study: Poor Kids Who Believe in Meritocracy Suffer – The Atlantic

“Meritocracy” was widely adopted as a best practice among open source projects in the founding days of the movement: it appeared to speak to collaboration amongst peers and across organizational boundaries. 20 years later,  we understand that this concept was practiced in a world characterized by both hidden bias and outright abuse. The notion of “meritocracy” can often obscure bias and can help perpetuate a dominant culture. Meritocracy does not consider the reality that tech does not operate on a level playing field.

Words Matter – Moving Beyond “Meritocracy” – Mozilla Stands for Inclusion

Meritocracy entrenches privilege.

When white people think about charity or philanthropy, you consider how you can “help” or “support” others, or “be a good person.” This line of thinking presumes you have amassed your wealth through intelligence and hard work. This is what we call the myth of the meritocracy. Nobody is saying you aren’t smart or hardworking, but have you ever considered why and how white people have amassed exponentially more wealth than people of color? Is it that you are smarter and more hardworking than us, across the board?

Of course not.

You’ve amassed wealth through a system of white supremacy. You have literally made money on the backs of BIPOC. Stolen land. Stolen labor. Stolen ideas. So the notion that you want to “give” or “help” as a way of doing something good is all part of this myth that you earned everything you have through merit.

You did not.

White Women: Everything You Already Know about Your Own Racism and How to Do Better

In computer science classrooms across high schools and universities, minorities are excluded and exit early in the pipeline. Along with the pressure to keep up with our “exceptional” peers, we face the pressure of being a model minority or a success story. Like it or not, being regarded as exceptional is a privilege, not proof of a meritocracy.

Undergraduate computer science education is the most common and traditional way people enter the pipeline, and the concept of exceptionality is baked into students early. In freshman year, the “geniuses” are separated from the proletarians as there is a huge pressure to assert your talents and capabilities. The exceptional students, the ones that have already contributed to open-source projects or won programming contests, emerge as the people everyone else should aspire to be.

There is nothing wrong with celebrating talented programmers, but only privileged men and occasionally people who are seen as model minorities are being recognized. Students are entering the industry with false and dangerous assumptions about gender, race, sexuality, success, and education. These assumptions lead to certain groups being treated as exceptional and others being excluded, and eventually leaving. Rather than focusing on discovering exceptional programmers, there needs to be more initiatives to support gender, racial, and LGBT inclusion in the pipeline.

Exclusion and Exceptionality in the Pipeline by Julia Nguyen | Model View Culture

Despite the enduring power of the rugged individual and meritocracy myths, the burden of evidence shows that privilege (race, class, and gender) continues to trump effort and even achievement in the real world: less educated whites earn more than more educated blacks, men earn more than equally educated women, and so forth.

The perils of “Growth Mindset” education: Why we’re trying to fix our kids when we should be fixing the system – Salon.com

One of the hazards of life in the 9.9 percent is that our necks get stuck in the upward position. We gaze upon the 0.1 percent with a mixture of awe, envy, and eagerness to obey. As a consequence, we are missing the other big story of our time. We have left the 90 percent in the dust-and we’ve been quietly tossing down roadblocks behind us to make sure that they never catch up.

The Birth of the New American Aristocracy – The Atlantic

The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.

The Birth of the New American Aristocracy – The Atlantic

Now as before, this myth has profound social and psychological effects. Much like the imperial exam system before it, the Gaokao transforms the social labor of parents, teachers, and schools into a measure of individual merit—a test score or examination ranking—that for the successful candidate embodies cultural overtones of charisma, a quality akin to divine favor (Weber 1946).

Howlett, Zachary M.. Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China (p. 22). Cornell University Press.

The “lowering the bar” narrative has no basis in reality.

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

Several signs point towards the potential for positive change. We now have a deeper understanding of bias and the cognitive processes behind it. We have more technology tools to mitigate bias at scale. We have data that show there is both a pipeline problem (e.g. access to Computer Science classes is inversely correlated with underrepresented students of color and low income students in public schools) and a leaky pipeline problem  —  in other words, the myriad of subtle and not-so-subtle barriers and biases that begin with media messages and teacher expectations and progress all the way through hiring biases. However, companies still employ a check the box approach that prioritizes mitigating liability and improving public perception over building an inclusive workforce. Internal policies have been shaped more by lawyers and risk mitigators, focused on avoiding lawsuits and excluding those who truly understand the ways in which companies can build inclusive cultures and processes.

Furthermore, the meritocracy myth continues to persist. Tinkering with systems predicated on this belief is seen as social engineering or “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

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

“Pipeline” rhetoric has polarized the way tech companies recruit, interview, and hire.

Inclusion must be embedded in all aspects of the hiring process, and beyond. “Pipeline” rhetoric has polarized the way tech companies recruit, interview, and hire. Focusing on gender allows companies to temporarily absolve themselves of responsibility with respect to age, religion, race, experience, disability, sexual orientation, and other aspects of diversity. Inclusion training must be included with all new employees from day one, while giving employees from historically underrepresented groups access to internal resources and support.

Employee lifecycle

Focus is often given to the “pipeline problem,” allowing tech companies to address diversity without making changes within their own organization.

Diversity for Sale by Anonymous Author | Model View Culture

A huge amount of diversity effort and money is focused on “the pipeline problem.” Not enough young people get interested in technology, so they never enter the pipeline, so they never get CS degrees, so they never are available to hire as programmers, so these tech companies never get their “fair share” of diversity. It is simultaneously the excuse many use for issues with diversity and their best hope to improve it in the future.

The monomaniacal focus on this narrative does a disservice to underrepresented people in tech in the present and future. A pipeline has many entry points and continues on for a distance. Focusing solely on a single entry point leaves the rest to disrepair. The metaphor is so broken that many have added their own sardonic twists: The pipeline is leaky and full of acid. The pipeline leads to a sewage treatment plant. The pipeline ends in a meat grinder.

In popular conceptions of the “pipeline”, the single entry point is the traditional computer science degree. Companies ignore other methods of entry like apprenticeship programs, hiring self-taught programmers, or transitioning staff from related roles like QA and support. Many small and midsize companies aren’t even willing to invest in junior engineers who do have a traditional CS degree. Companies simultaneously claim they care about diversity and hiring the best engineers, yet their “meritocratic” methods for identifying the latter often are in conflict with the former.

Diversity for Sale by Anonymous Author | Model View Culture

Many companies ignore large portions of the pipeline once you leave the beginning. They’re not sharing their attrition numbers. You’re unlikely to hear about how they’re addressing toxic environments. The most you will probably hear about is addressing issues related to babies (e.g. maternity leave, freezing eggs). I’ve heard more than a few stories about leaders largely blaming motherhood for the lack of diversity in tech despite studies to the contrary. Ultimately, it’s easier for people to point at the “pipeline problem,” allowing them to wash their hands of investing in change within their own organizations in the here and now.

Diversity for Sale by Anonymous Author | Model View Culture

Although there has been a recent call to abandon the “leaky pipeline” metaphor, it gives us a clue of how we think about education and career development: fluids in pipes start somewhere and end up somewhere else. They don’t flow backwards, they don’t stop at some point in the pipe and hang out for a while, and they only branch at predetermined locations. The pipeline models success, growth and end states in a manner that implicitly assumes an unencumbered white male, with access to adequate financial and emotional supports, unharmed by structural oppression, with few external drivers competing for his time, and the ability to progress smoothly ever-forward. And as a metaphor, the pipeline envisions attrition as a one-way, absolute process; the people who leave almost waste material, lost forever.

Re-Recruit From the Leaky Pipeline by Seonaid Lee | Model View Culture

One of the things that is common across most STEM disciplines is that they are all-consuming. Dedication is proven by sacrificing everything else, or fitting “life” into the niches left after an 80-hour (plus) work week. The training period is long and likely to be supported on student loans, or paid below subsistence level. As we have broadened the recruitment pool at the front end, we have more people in the system who experience real structural conflicts between identities, some of which result in their choosing to abandon their technical careers. “I cannot balance these things. Something has to go, and it can’t be my (aging parents, children, outstanding bills, mental health) any longer. It will have to be the dreams of (science, code, mathematics, a corner office).”

Re-Recruit From the Leaky Pipeline by Seonaid Lee | Model View Culture

Maybe it is time to abandon the leaky pipeline metaphor, and reclaim our own skills and talents, rather than accept a role as raw materials to be moved around at whim by a system. Or worse, to contort and diminish ourselves in order to fit in the pipes.

Re-Recruit From the Leaky Pipeline by Seonaid Lee | Model View Culture

In computer science classrooms across high schools and universities, minorities are excluded and exit early in the pipeline. Along with the pressure to keep up with our “exceptional” peers, we face the pressure of being a model minority or a success story. Like it or not, being regarded as exceptional is a privilege, not proof of a meritocracy.

Undergraduate computer science education is the most common and traditional way people enter the pipeline, and the concept of exceptionality is baked into students early. In freshman year, the “geniuses” are separated from the proletarians as there is a huge pressure to assert your talents and capabilities. The exceptional students, the ones that have already contributed to open-source projects or won programming contests, emerge as the people everyone else should aspire to be.

Exclusion and Exceptionality in the Pipeline by Julia Nguyen | Model View Culture

Collaboration is usually not permitted in CS classes, in part due to fears of plagiarism. Although students inevitably collaborate, they submit their work independently. As a result, the pressure to be an exceptional programmer is greater. In the industry, programming is communal and collaboration does not taint intellectual property, and engineering teams thrive when their programmers are able to work well together. Collaboration allows for people to learn from one another and value each other’s work. In contrast, group assignments are often only done in senior CS courses, ensuring that individual achievement and exceptionality are centered over teamwork and collaboration early on.

Exclusion and Exceptionality in the Pipeline by Julia Nguyen | Model View Culture

There is nothing wrong with celebrating talented programmers, but only privileged men and occasionally people who are seen as model minorities are being recognized. Students are entering the industry with false and dangerous assumptions about gender, race, sexuality, success, and education. These assumptions lead to certain groups being treated as exceptional and others being excluded, and eventually leaving. Rather than focusing on discovering exceptional programmers, there needs to be more initiatives to support gender, racial, and LGBT inclusion in the pipeline.

Exclusion and Exceptionality in the Pipeline by Julia Nguyen | Model View Culture

Programming is no longer an exclusive club for computer science-educated men, but capable programmers are still being pushed out of our industry because they lack racial, gender, and academic privilege — and it starts early in the pipeline. Whether it’s a programming contest, bootcamp, internship, or computer science education, many paths into tech jobs are intimidating or unaccessible to beginner and underrepresented programmers. And whether they took a traditional or nontraditional path to the industry, programmers are expected to be ready-to-go with all the necessary skills for employment once they enter the field. This places a huge pressure on programmers to be perfect, which makes the pipeline painfully competitive.

Exclusion and Exceptionality in the Pipeline by Julia Nguyen | Model View Culture

Credentialism is economic discrimination disguised as opportunity.

Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone. They send the message that work is not labor to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, who reward the unpaid worker with “exposure” and “experience”. The promotion of unpaid labor has already eroded opportunity – and quality – in fields like journalism and politics. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity.

The children of the millennials have been born into a United States of entrenched meritocracy – what Pierre Bourdieu called “the social alchemy that turns class privilege into merit”. Success is allegedly based on competition, not background, but one must be prepared to pay to play.

“This reliance on un- or underpaid labor is part of a broader move to a ‘privilege economy’ instead of a merit economy – where who you know and who pays your bills can be far more important than talent,” writes journalist Farai Chideya, noting that this system often locks out minorities.

What they are defending is a system in which wealth is passed off as merit, in which credentials are not earned but bought. Aptitude is a quality measured by how much money you can spend on its continual reassessment.

For lower class parents, admissions is a test failed at birth: An absence of wealth guised as a deficiency of merit. In the middle are the students, stranded players in a rigged game.

Namely, they have raised the price of the credentials needed to participate in the new meritocracy by such dramatic measures that it locks out a large part of the population while sending nearly everyone else into debt.

Young US citizens have inherited an entrenched meritocracy that combines the baby boomers’ emphasis on education with the class rigidity of the WASP aristocracy it allegedly undermined.

In an entrenched meritocracy, those who cannot purchase credentials are not only ineligible for most middle-class jobs, but are informed that their plight is the result of poor “choices”. This ignores that the “choice” of college usually requires walking the road of financial ruin to get the reward – a reward of employment that, in this economy, is illusory.

Credentialism is economic discrimination disguised as opportunity.

The View From Flyover Country

The children of the millennials have been born into a United States of entrenched meritocracy – what Pierre Bourdieu called “the social alchemy that turns class privilege into merit”. Success is allegedly based on competition, not background, but one must be prepared to pay to play.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

Harvard is but one of many US universities whose admissions policies ensure that the entering class is comprised of the ruling class.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

Students whose parents pay tens of thousands for SAT tutors to help their child take the test over and over compete against students who struggle to pay the fee to take the test once. Students who spend afternoons on “enrichment” activities compete against students working service jobs to pay bills – jobs which don’t “count” in the admissions process. Students who shell out for exotic volunteer trips abroad compete with students of what C Z Nnaemeka termed “the un-exotic underclass” – the poor who have “the misfortune of being insufficiently interesting”, the poor who make up most of the US today.

For upper class parents, the college admissions process has become a test of loyalty: What will you spend, what values will you compromise, for your child to be accepted? For lower class parents, admissions is a test failed at birth: An absence of wealth guised as a deficiency of merit. In the middle are the students, stranded players in a rigged game.

It does not have to be this way. Imagine a college application system in which applicants could only take standardized tests once. Imagine a system in which young people working jobs to support their families were valued as much as those who travel and “volunteer” on their parents’ dime. Imagine a system in which we valued what a person did with what he had, instead of mistaking a lack of resources for a lack of ability.

Imagine a system in which a child’s future did not rest on his parents’ past.

A higher education system that once promoted social mobility now serves to solidify class barriers. Desperate parents compromise their principles in order to spare their children rejection. But it is the system itself that must be rejected. True merit cannot be bought – and admission should not be either.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

Education is a luxury the minimum wage worker cannot afford. This message is passed on to their children.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

“This reliance on un- or underpaid labor is part of a broader move to a ‘privilege economy’ instead of a merit economy – where who you know and who pays your bills can be far more important than talent,” writes journalist Farai Chideya, noting that this system often locks out minorities.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

What they are defending is a system in which wealth is passed off as merit, in which credentials are not earned but bought. Aptitude is a quality measured by how much money you can spend on its continual reassessment.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

For lower class parents, admissions is a test failed at birth: An absence of wealth guised as a deficiency of merit. In the middle are the students, stranded players in a rigged game.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

Namely, they have raised the price of the credentials needed to participate in the new meritocracy by such dramatic measures that it locks out a large part of the population while sending nearly everyone else into debt.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

In the post-employment economy, jobs are privileges, and the privileged have jobs.

American ideology has long tilted between individualism and Calvinism. What happened to you was either supposed to be in your control – the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” approach – or divinely arbitrated. You either jumped, or you were meant to fall. Claims you were pushed, or you were born so far down you could not climb up, were dismissed as excuses of the lazy. This is the way many saw their world before it collapsed.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

When people are expected to work unpaid for the promise of work, the advantage goes to those immune from the hustle: the owners over the renters, the salaried over the contingent. Attempts to ensure stability and independence for citizens – such as affordable healthcare – are decried as government “charity” while corporate charity is proffered as a substitute for a living wage.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

The “lifetime of citizenship, opportunity, growth and change” Drew Gilpin Faust extolled is something most Americans desire. But it is affordable only for a select few: the baby boomers who can buy their children opportunities as the system they created screws the rest.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

Participation in these programs and internships is often dependent on personal wealth, resulting in a system of privilege that replicates itself over generations. McArdle compares America’s eroded meritocracy to imperial China, noting that “the people entering journalism, or finance, or consulting, or any other ‘elite’ profession, are increasingly the children of the children of those who rocketed to prosperity through the post-war education system. A window that opened is closing”.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

Young Americans seeking full-time employment tend to find their options limited to two paths: one of low-status, low-paying temp jobs emblematic of poverty; another of high-status, low-paying temp jobs emblematic of wealth. America is not only a nation of temporary employees – the Walmart worker on a fixed-day contract, the immigrant struggling for a day’s pay in a makeshift “temp town” – but of temporary jobs: intern , adjunct , fellow.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

Post-recession America runs on a contingency economy based on prestige and privation. The great commonality is that few are paid enough to live instead of simply survive.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

In the post-employment economy, full-time jobs are parceled into low-wage contract labor, entry-level jobs turn into internships, salaries are paid in exposure, and dignity succumbs to desperation.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

The problem in America is not that there are no jobs. It is that jobs are not paying. America is becoming a nation of zero-opportunity employers, in which certain occupations are locked into a terrible pay rate for no valid reason, and certain groups – minorities, the poor, and increasingly, the middle class – are locked out of professions because they cannot buy their way in.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

During the recession, American companies found an effective new way to boost profits. It was called “not paying people”. “Not paying people” tends to be justified in two ways: a fake crisis (“Unfortunately, we can’t afford to pay you at this time…”) or a false promise (“Working for nearly nothing now will get you a good job later”).

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

In reality, profits are soaring and poorly compensated labor tends to lead to more poorly compensated labor. Zero opportunity employers are refusing to pay people because they can get away with it. The social contract does not apply to contract workers – and in 2013, that is increasingly what Americans are.

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America

Pursuit of meritocracy triggers bias.

Perhaps more disturbing, simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behaviour. The management scholar Emilio Castilla at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based compensation in private companies. They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value.

This is surprising because impartiality is the core of meritocracy’s moral appeal. The ‘even playing field’ is intended to avoid unfair inequalities based on gender, race and the like. Yet Castilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. They suggest that this ‘paradox of meritocracy’ occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behaviour for signs of prejudice.

Meritocracy is a false and not very salutary belief. As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. It is a well-established psychological principle that people prefer to believe that the world is just.

A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you

These findings led Castilla to wonder if organizational cultures and practices designed to promote meritocracy actually accomplished the opposite. Could it be that the pursuit of meritocracy somehow triggered bias? Along with his colleague, the Indiana University sociology professor Stephen Bernard, they designed a series of lab experiments to find out. Each experiment had the same outcome. When a company’s core values emphasized meritocratic values, those in managerial positions awarded a larger monetary reward to the male employee than to an equally performing female employee. Castilla and Bernard termed their counter intuitive result “the paradox of meritocracy.”

The paradox of meritocracy builds on other research showing that those who think they are the most objective can actually exhibit the most bias in their evaluations. When people think they are objective and unbiased then they don’t monitor and scrutinize their own behavior. They just assume that they are right and that their assessments are accurate. Yet, studies repeatedly show that stereotypes of all kinds (gender, ethnicity, age, disability etc.) are filters through which we evaluate others, often in ways that advantage dominant groups and disadvantage lower-status groups. For example, studies repeatedly find that the resumes of whites and men are evaluated more positively than are the identical resumes of minorities and women.

This dynamic is precisely why meritocracy can exacerbate inequality—because being committed to meritocratic principles makes people think that they actually are making correct evaluations and behaving fairly. Organizations that emphasize meritocratic ideals serve to reinforce an employee’s belief that they are impartial, which creates the exact conditions under which implicit and explicit biases are unleashed.

The False Promise of Meritocracy – The Atlantic

Mindset marketing is repackaged rugged individualism.

I am cautious about the quality of growth mindset and grit research as valid, and that caution is grounded in the first level-both concepts fit well into American myths about rugged individualism and the Puritan work ethic; thus, even so-called dispassionate researchers are apt to see no reason to challenge the studies (although some have begun to unpack and question Angela Duckworth’s studies on grit).

Scarcity, mentioned about, is a compilation of powerful studies that make a case unlike what most Americans believe about success and failure: those living in scarcity struggle because of the scarcity (think poverty), and those living in slack are often successful because of the slack. This work has not been embraced or received the celebrity of growth mindset and grit because it works against our narratives.

Privileged researchers blinded by their own belief in American myths as well as trust in their own growth mindset and grit, I fear, are not apt to challenge research that appears even to a scholar to be obvious.

The third level is the most damning since growth mindset and grit speak to and reinforce powerful cultural ideologies and myths about meritocracies and individual character-ones that are contradicted by the evidence; and thus, growth mindset and grit contribute to lazy and biased thinking and assumptions about marginalized groups who suffer currently under great inequities.

K-12 applications of growth mindset and grit have disproportionately targeted racial minorities and impoverished students, reinforcing that most of the struggles within these groups academically are attributable to deficits in those students, deficits linked to race and social class.

Rejecting Growth Mindset and Grit at Three Levels | radical eyes for equity

Science pretends to be meritocratic.

And maybe from what I’ve already said you’ve started to get that sense that perhaps the decisions that determine who becomes a scientist and who doesn’t aren’t as based in objective differences in ability as we sometimes think they are.

And you’d be right. Lots of people much smarter than I am have already debunked the myth of meritocracy, in science and the world more broadly.

The other lesson is that, despite what some people really want to think, scientific institutions are just not meritocratic. They’re just not, I’m sorry, they’re not, we all want them to be, I know we do, but they’re not.

And this is really really important—like, I’ve been in so many conversations where people get stuck on this point of ‘you know, sure we want to make science more inclusive, but how do we do that while maintaining our true meritocracy?’

My dudes you were never meritocratic to begin with!

How Science Pretends to be Meritocratic | A Dr. Fatima Video Essay – YouTube

The interpretation of objectivity as neutral does not allow for participation or stances. This uninvolved, uninvested approach implies “a conquering gaze from nowhere” (Haraway 1988). In many ways, claims of objectivity allow one to “represent while escaping representation” (Haraway 1988) and mimics the construction of Whiteness2 in the racialization of marginalized peoples (Battey and Leyva 2016; Guess 2006). Indeed, there is extensive evidence suggesting that STEM cultural norms are traditionally White, masculine, heteronormative and able-bodied (Atchison and Libarkin 2016; Chambers 2017; Eisenhart and Finkel 1998; Johnson 2001; Nespor 1994; Seymour and Hewitt 1997; Traweek 1988). Thus, while purporting to be a neutral application of a generic protocol, science-and STEM more broadly-has a distinct set of cultures that governs legitimate membership and acceptable behaviors. The concept of a meritocracy is often used to justify who succeeds in STEM cultures. However, far from “leveling the playing field”, meritocracies exist in cultural systems that prioritize people who have, or to a lesser extent closely emulate, these traits. Success in science, then, tends to privilege cultural traits associated with the above identities and often marginalizes scientists who can not or will not perform these identities. This introduces structural inequities in the pursuit of science that align with social manifestations of racism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia and ableism (Cech and Pham 2017; Wilder 2014).

Genealogy | Free Full-Text | Defining the Flow—Using an Intersectional Scientific Methodology to Construct a VanguardSTEM Hyperspace | HTML

Affirmative action exists for white people.

I am tired of the academic affirmative action which has made it not just so that white people are overrepresented at elite colleges (and in professorships), but that their “white racial privilege” at these colleges, where black students are nearly invisible, means that they are more overrepresented now than they were in 1994.

I am tired of the affirmative action for white students at Ivy League universities, where the percentage of students admitted via “legacy admissions” (simply because their parents or ancestors went there) at schools like Harvard is higher than the total percentage of black students.

I am tired of the white affirmative action which means that if a black student can get into college, their job prospects are about as good as those of a white high school dropout. Now that‘s affirmative action! Similarly, a white high school graduate benefits from affirmative action when he has the same job prospects as a black male college graduate, simply by virtue of having been born into a society which raced them as white.

I am tired of the fact that only 13 percent of journalism jobs go to non-white people because of the enduring white affirmative action of the American media.

I am tired of the racist and gendered affirmative action in American society which means that black women nationally earn only 67 cents for every dollar a white man earns. And I am sick of these affirmative action-beneficiary white men deriding black women as “welfare queens,” when black women work more for less than anyone else in the nation and when they showed up in the past two election cycles more than any other race/gender subgroup.

What Jeff Sessions Will Never Understand About Affirmative Action

These kids and their parents display a range of beliefs about race. “Racism is not a problem,” one girl tells Hagerman, adding that it “was a problem when all those slaves were around and that, like, bus thing and the water fountain.” Meanwhile, the girl’s mother nods along. Other parents in the book have educated themselves better, but often, intentionally or unintentionally, still end up giving their kids advantages that, in the abstract, they claim to oppose. (White Kids is not, as Hagerman writes at one point, “a particularly hopeful book.”)

I recently spoke to Hagerman, and that second group kept coming up in our conversation—how, despite their intentions, progressive-minded white families can perpetuate racial inequality. She also discussed ways they can avoid doing so.

How to Teach White Kids About Race – The Atlantic

The meritocracy myth has turned our schools into high-stakes sorting grounds.

For many well-to-do parents, efforts to address persistent racial and socioeconomic disparities in academic achievement represent a threat to their own children’s chances. They are on high alert for any sign that their kids are being handicapped, particularly in the schools. Education, after all, is how young people are supposed to get ahead in a society in which social and economic status are presumably earned by virtue of talent and hard work. This meritocratic myth has turned our schools into high-stakes sorting grounds. Graduate from the right school with the right grades, and your path is secure. Go to the wrong school, or worse yet, fail to get enough schooling, and you might just end up where you deserve: at the bottom of the heap. These days, that drop down the economic ladder is particularly steep—the wealth gap is as wide today as it was in the so-called Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

For those with a real chance to win, it makes no sense to question the scramble for social mobility. Instead, their energies are best spent moving to the right school district, or even shelling out for private school tuition if it will get their kids an advantage. They’ll ensure that their kids gain access to AP and honors courses, assemble gleaming transcripts, and ace their SATs. They’ll pay for club sports and music lessons, leverage their contacts, and apply to at least a dozen different colleges and universities. No wonder these folks go wild when local policy talk turns to proposals like “de-tracking” or “open honors.” As politicians like Glenn Youngkin have figured out, this education anxiety can also be used for political gain.

Berkshire, Jennifer C.; Schneider, Jack. The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual (pp. 52-53). The New Press.

In his book The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits argues that the battle for elite credentials exacerbates inequality, hampers social mobility, and makes even the so-called winners of the educational arms race miserable. “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work,” writes Markovits. As he argues, the quest to prove one’s “merit” through education is a rigged game. “It blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”

Berkshire, Jennifer C.; Schneider, Jack. The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual (p. 140). The New Press.

Don't forget your history
Know your destiny
In the abundance of water
The fool is thirsty
Rat race, rat race, rat race!

Rat race!
Oh, it's a disgrace
To see the human-race
In a rat race, rat race!
You got the horse race
You got the dog race
You got the human-race
But this is a rat race, rat race!

Examination scores are socially produced.

…examination scores, although they are often presented as the accomplishment of individuals, are in fact socially produced. Individuals do not achieve high scores in a vacuum. Rather, they benefit from a variety of social resources, which educational sociologists, following Pierre Bourdieu, refer to as various forms of capital (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Bourdieu 1977, 1986, 1990). Families rely on social connections to get children into good schools (social capital). Similarly, children with educated parents get a leg up on schoolwork because of their family’s academic knowledge, which is regarded as providing a superior home environment (cultural capital). And parents who are wealthy—that is, have large amounts of economic capital—are able to transform this wealth into other forms of capital. For example, they can compensate for deficits in social capital by bribing school officials or make up for deficits in cultural capital by paying for after-school lessons. The goal is to acquire what sociologists refer to as symbolic capital, of which educational credentials form the paradigm (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Bourdieu 1977, 1986, 1990, 1991).

The net result of these arrangements is that people who achieve remarkable educational success usually have something special in their backgrounds that makes it possible. People tend to see the stories of dark horses and examination champions as reflecting the heroic capacities of isolated individuals. But usually these extraordinary test athletes could not have achieved their accomplishments alone. The farmer’s daughter who tests into Tsinghua University (tied with Peking University for first place in the Chinese college rankings) is also the niece of a high-school principal. The son of a migrant worker who gains admission to Peking University (also known as Beijing University) was fostered out from a young age to a well-educated aunt, who willingly accepted this duty because her less educated sibling financed her through college. In Zeyu’s case, his father’s extraordinary motivation certainly played a role in his own qualified success.

But the Gaokao and exams like it essentially render moot the contribution of parents, relatives, teachers, and schools. By discounting these contributions, test scores exaggerate the degree to which people pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and allow parents and children to think of these scores as individual accomplishments.

Howlett, Zachary M.. Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China (pp. 20-21). Cornell University Press.

The grading and ranking of children perverts everything.

the last time marriage partners sorted themselves by educational status as much as they do now was in the 1920s.

The Birth of the New American Aristocracy – The Atlantic

“That as long as we construct learning as a competition where we measure and rank individuals against one another, individuals with more power and money will find a way to game that system so they win. #MeritocracyEqualsAristocracy”

“As long as schools are grading and ranking children, they are shaming them.”

• The Case Against Grades (##) – Alfie Kohn
• Why I Don’t Grade | Jesse Stommel
• Grades are for Onions, Beef, and Other Produce; Not Children

Further Reading

• Neoliberalism
  • Respectability Politics
  • W.E.I.R.D.
  • Meritocracy Myth
  • Lowering the Bar
  • Performative Neurodiversity (Neurodiversity Lite)
  • Policing
  • Predatory Inclusion
  • Burnout
  • STEM
  • Ableism
  • Eugenics
  • Harm Reduction Theater
  • Empire of Normality
• Conservatism
  • Resentment
  • Southern Strategy
  • Lost Cause
  • Segregationist Discourse
  • Meritocracy Myth
  • Lowering the Bar
  • Minority Stress
  • Racial Weathering
  • Policing
  • Toxic Masculinity
  • Bodily Autonomy
  • Biological Essentialism
  • Stigma
  • Shame
  • Ableism
  • Eugenics
  • R-Word
  • Empire of Normality
• Power
• Privilege
• Precarity
  • Extractive Abandonment
  • Artificial Scarcity
  • Collective Risk Shift
  • Burnout
  • ”Better get used to it.”
• Oligarchy
• Sadopopulism
• Rot Economy
  • It’s not DEI’s Fault; It’s the Rot Economy
  • Enshittification
  • Metric Fixation
• Fantasy Economy
  • STEM
  • Metric Fixation
• Metric Fixation
  • Efficiency
  • McNamara Fallacy
  • Enshittification
• Objectivity
  • When you measure include the measurer.
  • Scientism
  • Epistemic Injustice
  • Scientific Essentialism
  • Fundamental Attribution Error
  • Conquering Gaze From Nowhere
  • Scientism and Epistemic Injustice: On the Problems with “Science of Reading”
• Tech Ethics
  • Techno-solutionism
  • Techno-Legal Solutionism
  • Technoableism
  • Algorithm
  • Roaming Autodidact
  • Enshittification
  • Disability Dongle
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Luddite Sensibilities
  • Hear me out a bit before the future comes around.
• Ableism
  • Neuronormativity
  • Empire of Normality
  • Pathology Paradigm
  • Behaviorism
  • Eugenics
  • Deficit Ideology
  • Empire of Normality
  • Sameness-Based Fairness
  • ”Better get used to it.”
  • Inspiration Exploitation
  • School-Induced Anxiety
  • Toxic Positivity
  • Resilience
  • Burnout
  • The Road to Neuronormative Domination.
  • Education Technology and the New Behaviorism
  • We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence
  • 14 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice
  • Double Empathy Problem
  • Double Empathy Extreme Problem
  • Triple Empathy Problem
  • Disability Double-bind
  • Performative Neurodiversity (Neurodiversity Lite)
  • Empire of Normality
• Harm Reduction Theater
  • Bikeshedding
  • Wellness
  • Mindset Marketing
  • Resilience
  • Performative Neurodiversity (Neurodiversity Lite)