Merit-Based Pay: White Men Still Win
September 25th, 2008 by SocProf and tagged Gender, Labor, Patriarchy, Sexism, Social Inequalities, Social Privilege, Social Stratification, Sociology
Via Contexts Crawler, this article from the Washington Post is an interesting addendum to my earlier post how men with conservative gender views get paid more:
"Women and minorities received less pay than white men even when their performance scores were equal, and the bias occurred in many departments of the large service organization he studied, according to MIT’s Emilio J. Castilla. He analyzed raises at the organization and found what he called "performance reward bias" — even when the system of measuring worker contributions was fair.
The biases were introduced when a supervisor recommended raises or when the human resources department approved them, he said.
Castilla studies social networks and organizational influences on employment. His research, published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Sociology, found that minorities and women had starting salaries similar to those of white men. Biases crept in over time, creating a pay gap. Even though merit-based systems create the appearance of meritocracy, he said, they need more transparency and accountability to live up to it."
So, it may well be that men with conservative gender views receive better evaluations from their supervisors, are part of the same networks and therefore, their supervisors have more unspoken similarities with them.
This means that companies and organizations may have explicit merit-based systems formally in place which give out the impression of fairness while in reality reproducing inequalities along the same lines as usual. It may also be that for these white men, there are other forms of capital, unequally distributed, that they are able to cash in on (see Bourdieu on that).
Posted in Gender, Labor, Networks, Patriarchy, Sexism, Social Inequalities, Social Privilege, Social Stratification, Sociology | No Comments »
