Big tech meritocracy excludes women and people of colour
Despite enough qualified candidates, the reproduction of power in its own image is keeping Silicon Valley male and White.
A college student drops out of higher education and uses their innate, natural talents to start a successful business. The initial investment for the company comes from the founders ability to hustle and secure venture capital. As the company grows, the founder seeks to employ people in their own professional image; ambitious, intelligent, creative problem solvers. The star performers are promoted based on merit alone, without thought to internal politics, gender or race. The cream rises to the top. This is the promise of meritocracy in the tech industry.
Michael Young coined the term meritocracy as a pejorative in a 1958 satirical analysis of the British class system where merit, above anything else, carried the most favour. Meritocracy was a shake-up of the hierarchical existing class system, where your financial and social origins were the defining factors of your success. Young envisioned a system where a simple formula to define merit decided your place in society.
IQ + effort = merit
This formulaic concept of meritocracy as a process for quantifying value has now become an ideology where the best ideas and people are most successful. In its ideological form, meritocracy is a foundational aspect of how many tech companies articulate their cultural values; a virtue-signalling beacon for the new technological neoliberal dream that promises upwards social mobility for those who are willing to pursue knowledge and work hard.
If an individual isn’t worthy of being gifted an equal share of resources and opportunity by virtue of simply existing, in theory, they’re forced to develop skills that enable them to compete. Which is where meritocracy enters the narrative as an agent for delivering social mobility — a merit based system removes the dynastic reproduction of inherited power and places opportunity in the hands of the most capable, and therefore most deserving.
In the meritocratic ideal of tech companies, wealth isn’t restricted to a given race, social class or gender. Those who are most entrepreneurial or technologically skilled will amass wealth, whilst those without these skills face unemployment or low paid work.
What makes careers in tech more meritocratic than other professions?
Wall Street has felt the burden of increased competition for talentemanating from Silicon Valley. Aside from salaries, the main reason millennials are turning their attention away from more traditional careers in finance is the belief they will make more impact with a career in technology. There is also a persistent sentiment that Wall Street career trajectories are highly dependent on nepotism, or having completed an expensive MBA at the right school.
Consequently, a crucial difference between big tech and more traditional professions is lower barriers to entry. Entrepreneurs require no qualifications to found a company.
Likewise, the professions that make up the core roles of most tech startups — developers, software engineers, designers — are all unregulated informal professions that have no governing body to impose qualification barriers in the way that law, engineering or architecture do. These lower barriers to entry are attractive to ambitious people with less inherent advantage hoping to compete on an even field.
Meritocratic ideology can be intoxicatingly attractive in these circumstances and seems particularly alluring to Millennials.
91% of millennials rate career progression as the most important priority when considering a new job. Millennials also expect that years of experience isn’t the main requirement for promotion, and expect to see young people as part of the senior leadership team.
John Morgan, Chair of the Economics of Organizations at Berkeley Haas, argues that meritocratic professions attract highly talented individuals as they believe their efforts will be rewarded through promotion.
“Meritocracy succeeds in attracting the talented and repelling the untalented, because ability strongly colors how individuals view more meritocratic performance evaluation.
Talented individuals prefer more meritocracy, since it makes it more likely that their skills and performance will be properly recognized and rewarded. Untalented individuals, by contrast, positively prefer less meritocracy, since it allows them to hide their deficiencies in the noise of the performance measure.”
To evaluate the meritocratic performance of tech companies, two factors we can measure are:
1. Diversity
Meritocracy presents as both socially liberal and libertarian in nature, because it doesn’t discriminate based on gender, age, race, religion or geography while emphasising the agency of the individual to enact change. If this is true, tech companies diversity should reflect the society it exists in.
Google’s latest diversity report shows that it is still dominated by White and Asian males who make up 64.2% of workforce, with 68% of employees being male overall. 41.9% of employees are Asian and 51.7% are White. Only 3.7% of employees are Black and 5.9% are Latinx. Although the hiring of Black candidates has increased 0.7% between 2019 and 2020, hiring rates for Latinx and Native Americans have fallen which offsets the progress in hiring none White and Asian candidates.
Google’s intersectional workforce representation has remained effectively static with some minuscule gains for White women. The companies diversity report doesn’t include any data on disability, sexuality or the plurality of gender identity.
This lack of effective cross-society representation is evident as 13.4% of The United States population is Black or African American, 5.9% Asian and 18.5% Latinx.
Facebook has a similar distribution of workforce diversity to Google in their most recent diversity report. 63.1% of employees are male, 44.2% are White, and 43% are Asian. Only 5.2% are Latinx and 3.8% are Black.
Adobe’s diversity report offers even less than the previous two examples. Women have less representation at 33%. White and Asian ethnicity’s make up 90% of the workforce with only 2% of employees identifying as Black or African American.
All of these companies have argued they face a shortage of suitable ethnic minority candidates to hire from, however a report by USA Today found that Black and Latinx computer science students are graduating in twice the numbers that leading tech firms are hiring them. A Fortune survey from 2015 found that in the top nine tech firms in Silicon Valley, approximately one third of the workforce are female, however data from UC Berkeley and Stanford shows that 50% of their intake for STEM degrees are female.
If the issue of diversity in tech companies isn’t the availability of qualified candidates, we can conclude that tech companies have a problem with diversity that is structural rather than a lack of merit in potential employees.
This is reinforced by data for representation in leadership positions. We should expect that the leadership of a company at least reflect the diversity of its staff, if not wider society, however Google’s leadership is even more biased towards White men than the overall workplace representation of the company. 73.3% of leadership roles are filled by men and 65.9% of leaders are White. Facebook is similarly skewed, with 67.4% of leaders being men and 65.4% being White.
If people of colour aren’t being promoted at the same rate as their White colleagues we’re effectively saying that even when employed in big tech, they have less merit than White men.
2. Upwards social mobility
A 2019 study found that 260,000 new jobs in technology had been created in the US over the previous year. The same report also found that salaries for tech jobs were nearly double the median national wage. Despite this growth in jobs and wages, the OECD reports that social mobility has stalledin rich countries since the 1990’s. In both the US and and the UK, it would take five generations for a child born to a low income family to reach the average national income.
In contrast to these national trends, people in tech careers are more likely to experience social mobility. One study carried out by BCS, found that 75% of those in the IT profession have experienced upward social mobility relative to their parents’ social class. The same report also shows evidence that tech careers have better prospects for social mobility compared to law and medicine.
When we combine the data on diversity and social mobility we can see a picture where some people are far more likely to benefit than others from a career in tech.
White and Asian males are disproportionately more likely to see the benefits of a career in technology, whereas Black, Latinx and female employees are less likely to benefit. This narrative shifts the requirements in favour of the next generation of ‘technopreneurs’ as the criteria and skills for meritocratic success are moulded in the image of those already in power.
This failure of diversity could be explained by studies exploring “ingroup favouritism.” Rather than consciously discriminating against certain groups, this study shows how by favouring people most like ourselves we can create unintentional homogeneity. If our own social networks are lacking diversity, then the people we refer for job vacancies are more likely to be similar to ourselves. This can have compounding effects when it comes to performance reviews or promotions, where small biases can have larger repercussions in the long term.
Young realised this outcome in his book, The Rise of Meritocracy. The narrator concedes that if a person succeeds within a meritocracy, they will use their new advantages to the benefit of their offspring, consequently reproducing inherited privilege and undermining the concept of meritocracy.
This is reinforced by the moral relativity that meritocracy allows for individuals in justifying their success and ignoring their privileges. ‘I am talented and hard working, therefore my success is an outcome of those two factors alone.’
In his book, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, Daniel Markovits presents a scathing analysis of meritocracy as a positive system for social mobility. Speaking to Jacobin, he describes his core analysis of meritocracy:
“Meritocracy purports to ensure that social and economic rewards track achievement rather than breeding and, in this way, to underwrite deserved advantage, squaring hierarchy with democratic fairness and squaring private gain with the public good. The book’s central charge is that this account of merit is a sham.”
The diversity and social mobility data shows that meritocracy in Silicon Valley is not disrupting the status quo and existing hierarchical structures of power. Meritocracy produces its own hierarchy as successful parents invest privilege into their children through education, opportunity and access to networks in exactly the same way as inherited class advantages have done for centuries.
Meritocracy is an ideology of equal opportunity without care for equality of outcome; failing to recalibrate after each cycle of success or failure in order to maintain equality of opportunity. Eventually the inequality of opportunity becomes so large that the concept of attributing value to the best people and ideas no matter their race or gender is subverted entirely.
If we want to see a true reflection of society in the places we work, we must dismiss the myth that careers in tech allow the best and brightest to succeed equally. Even with lower barriers to entry than traditional careers, people in tech are hired by people in tech — unconscious bias, diversity of social network and inherent advantage allow some people to run faster than others towards success. We have to challenge the meritocratic narrative that failure to succeed is the fault of the individual and not the system.
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