Make Work Fair: 3 Strategies to Combat Meritocracy Myths

Forbes

13-04-2025

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As humans, we are wired for fairness. We need fairness to survive in groups and build trust and reciprocity as a social species. This is why young children understand the importance of fairness, commonly citing 'this is not fair' in protest for new rules or unpopular demands.
In my interview with Siri Chilazi, senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School and co-author of the new book Make Work Fair, they note, "There's so much research around the world that shows that fairness is a fundamental value. It's an extremely widely shared human value, and kids as young as four or five, six years old develop a very keen sense of what's fair and what's not, and also have very strong reactions to perceived unfairness."
Our sense of disgust is ignited when we feel unfairness. There is a real cost to this disgust in the workplace, where people are significantly less likely to stay in deeply unfair organizations. Fairness, or the lack thereof, can present itself in everyday situations like meetings, project team decisions or more substantial business decisions.
Workplace fairness has vast differences in perception by identity groups. According to Joan C. Williams' Bias Interruptors data, there is a significant difference (nearly 30%) in people's beliefs that the workplace is fair for white men (the dominant group) versus other historically marginalized groups (women, people of color) across industries.
Yet, there is this pervasive undercurrent that the workplace is built on meritocracy, thus fair. Chilazi shares, 'The world is not a meritocracy where the best people rise to the top purely based on their superior capabilities. It turns out that having someone see and recognize your potential, and then having a system in place for nurturing it, is a big piece of the puzzle. The world has never been a meritocracy.'
To combat this myth of meritocracy, and to ensure workplace fairness, Chilazi recommends:
'Perceptions of fairness is how we do things around here, what people say and do, what is expected and accepted at the organization. It's not about intentions, as teams rarely live up to virtuous intentions 100% of the time. It is about actual behavior,' Chilazi said. "Our behaviors and our decisions are to a very great extent influenced by the systems that surround us, but we can't sort of fundamentally expect to debias human brains.'
Rarely than focusing on individual behavior shifts to be less biased, which has proven to be ineffective, Chilazi's research recommends focusing on debiasing the systems instead to prevent inevitable human bias. For example, she offers the EAST framework for effective performance review processes. If you want performance reviews to be more fair, consider:
To debias performance reviews, start by compiling data on the current perceptions of fairness. Leaders can track review length, word frequencies or performance ratings. Chilazi offers up one fairness tweak—ask an open-ended advice question like, 'What is one thing that would make the employee more effective?' to ensure that their performance review is closely tied to observable behaviors rather than potential biases.
'Middle managers have emerged as linchpins in the creation of a healthy organizational culture. They have been found to be up to six times more relevant in predicting employee misconduct than company-wide factors, particularly when managers were further removed from headquarters. Middle managers might be among the most important culture carriers in an organization as employees see them on a regular basis and learn from them about which behaviors are acceptable and which ones are not,' Chilazi found.
Their studies showed in different settings, in different industries, and at different times, that people responded to people in positions of power or of greater social influence much more so than everyday people. Fairness is closely tied to the relationship you have with your direct manager. If you do not feel your manager is fair, you are unlikely to rate the workplace culture as fair.
While workplace fairness might feel elusive, it is possible. It is about baking fairness into the culture. "This definition of culture is 'how we do things around here,'" said Chilazi. "So it's very behavioral because it's about doing right at the end of the day, people might have any beliefs and values internally. But the thing that you can observe about them is what they say and do externally."
Chilazi refers to these as 'cultural artifacts.' This might be the office wall coverings, common language, stories shared, jokes, dress code or the occasions celebrated. According to Chilazi, all of these are manifestations of our shared identity as employees of an organization and can catalyze or inhibit our success at work.
When fairness as a behavior is ritualized as a part of the culture, positive peer pressure sets in, and people generally adhere to the virtue of fairness. It starts with ensuring that systems are fair, managers understand their roles and fairness is baked into the culture.