Addressing the complexities of meritocracy
MIT’s third annual Diversity Summit, held Wednesday at Kresge Auditorium, reflected the growing importance of inclusion at the Institute: From 70 attendees at the 2011 summit, the event has now grown to include about 700 members of the MIT community, said the event’s co-chair, professor of physics Edmund Bertschinger.But despite MIT’s clear, strong policies supporting equality and inclusion, speakers emphasized that there is still much work to be done. Good intentions, and even good policies, are not enough, they said: Research has shown that even in organizations that explicitly embrace meritocracy, the actual outcomes of those policies can sometimes be counterintuitive.For example, research by Emilio Castilla, an associate professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, has found that diversity policies can sometimes undermine their own intent. In one study, committees evaluating employees for salary increases at organizations with specific merit-based policies actually awarded significantly lower increases to women...