Words Matter – Moving Beyond “Meritocracy”
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
We have a word for that: "meritocracy". The fact that we may have failed to achieve this fully doesn't mean we should throw out the word.
By the Mozilla logic, we should also throw out "democracy" because our government(s) have failed to include all stakeholders; throw out "feminism" because a few of them have demonstrated that they're anti-male rather than pro-female; "education" because we've so badly failed to properly educate our youth (and adults!).
Really, pretty much everything we've set as a goal for ourselves, we've failed to achieve in its entirety: such is the nature of goals. But those lapses are just further goals for us to cover. Throwing up our hands and changing the goal posts, or at least how we reference the goal posts, isn't going to get us any closer to them, and seems more likely to confuse the issue, taking us at least somewhat farther away.
"Sometimes good words and good aspirations get tarnished with history, and need to be set aside"
...and...
"Sadly, “meritocracy” is not that word. Maybe it once was, or could have been. But not today."
Like it or not, words have more than etymological meaning. They also have historical and cultural meaning, that might be sharply at odds with their etymology, and that precludes their use even in situations where they're technically accurate. "Meritocracy" has become such a word. Like "traditional American values" and "celebration of European culture" as synonyms for racism, "meritocracy" has become a rallying cry for opposition to diversity, inclusion, and egalitarianism. All as the person who originally coined the word meant it, BTW. We can coin new words that are just as etymologically valid without the cultural baggage.
Or diversity and inclusiveness.
Every word, every ideal, and every good intention becomes tarnished by history. Humanity is not a perfect phenomenon: it is deeply imperfect. There is no way to have progress if our moral view of the world is purely associative.
Step 2: Bemoan that you need a new word for what meritocracy used to mean
Step 3: ??? (my guess is: rinse and repeat)
Frankly, I looked at this aspect of word smithing as a sort of shibboleth to identify the accepted crowd.
Meritocracy as a normal read of its definition should be a fine word, but Silicon Valley seems to be going through the same word smithing that DC goes through. New beliefs, new words, and must demonize the old words.
Whatever Mozilla sees themselves as today, this language is clearly different from that original vision. Meritocracy is closely aligned to technical outcomes in a way that diversity and inclusiveness are not.
What I mean is, if your meritocracy fails to produce good software, obviously it is broken. If your ... inclusivocracy? ... fails to produce good software then it doesn't mean anything.
Obviously this language doesn't preclude the technical, but the focus has clearly shifted in the intervening years.
A new group takes charge by their own merit, then they embed their own descendants in the leader caste through a combination of shaping society to their own definition of merit, and designing an education system to confer "merit" on their own offspring at the expense of less "merit-worthy" children (i.e. most children who do not have meritorious ancestors).
A meritocratic society also suffers from an additional problem over that of an aristocracy because it embeds the complementary statement - that those who are not well rewarded are in that position because they are not as good/hard-working/clever as their "betters".
On a smaller scale, the aristocracy problem exists from very early on in the forms of "hiring in ones own image" and placing certain roles in higher regard (with higher reward or more opportunity for career progression) than others (e.g. sales > developers > UX > QA) even if they make equal contributions.
It is very difficult to evaluate merit across different professions (e.g is Tom Cruise a better actor than Lionel Messi is a footballer? Does a lawyer contribute more to society than teacher?) However, once you start claiming that you have a meritocracy, you are also claiming that those who receive the most reward have the most merit. i.e. in the example above, that your sales people are more hard-working and clever than your developers, who are in turn more hard-working and clever than your UX people etc.
Unlike meritocracy though, there is no way out of the situation beyond tearing down the system.
Neither system necessitates the active oppression and exclusion of out groups.
The problem in both systems is that "merit" is defined by the few at the top, and is often either defined or executed in a way that favours individuals in a preferred class.
What often actually happens is they're judged on executing a standarised test (bureaucracy) or by peers. (oligarchy)
Worse, some systems called meritocracy do not try to properly fit people into functions at all, forcing them instead. In those, you get thrust into a function despite not fitting it and then judged low merit, preventing changing the function. This is a typical bureaucratic failure.
If you measure everyone in a company by how much money they directly make, then salespeople are the best, and everyone else is just drifting along on their wake. You could measure by functionality added, defects found, bugs fixed, projects completed, requirements gathered, and in each case, you assign merit to one class and not to others. Even if you have a reliable way to measure merit in one job family, how do you align the merit metrics across them?
The solution is either to be a judge or appoint a jury, preferably as unbiased as possible. Get a devil's advocate too. You can rotate these people and pick some who do not know much about the person mentioned to be impartial and prevent oligarchies from forming.
Look at number of mistakes and their severity, flaws. Check when and if there are successes and the person working above and beyond the standard of service or overcoming adversity. Look for initiative and improvements.
It works almost exactly like military promotion if you think about it. It's a very human definition and not one turned into a metric. It's what we use and should use in courts of law too. There may be some guidelines to help judging but they should not be hard law as that way lies bureaucracy and lack of adaptability.
Ultimately, all metrics depend on someone's judgement so why not make it explicit and transparent.
The trickiest part is to maintain fairness. Fairness as defined by the subject accepting the judgement, which is different from equality. This generally comes with informing them of why a certain judgement has been made which is contrary to what happens in most companies - both in hiring and advancement.
For example, that the _code_ has to have merit (OSS), not the people (new aristocracy).
There's something to be said about _paid_ open source software development though: once money is involved the meritocracy that can work with OSS clashes with the demands of those who pay or are paid - and therefore want the paid-for work landed no matter its technical merit, since that brings along the business or one's own promotion.
I'd wager the guess that the politics aren't very different from any other corporate politics, but potentially more visible due to the projects' structure.
With that in mind, I blame the disconnect about meritocracy in paid Open Source on the "paid-for" part, not on "Open Source bros fighting to exclude those who are not Like Them".
A survey of projects with no monetary interests (no sponsors, no donations to pay devs, not even companies using the code) to see if they have similar issues could test that hypothesis.
(disclosure: I'm paid to do open source development)
And then we can use it instead of meritocracy*. Inventing a new word will have the same problem and likely be worse due to the confusion around using a word with the same meaning except it’s not bad.
Where do I go?
I would suggest it's time to re-read "1984", because real life is rushing towards imitating it, and it's not just the government. Newspeak and doublethink are rapidly infecting many corporations.
George Orwell - A Final Warning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXm5hklbBsA)
Mozilla has done some fantastic work in shaping the internet like it is today, but this doesn't really bode well for the future.
On the contrary, I would think words like "diversity" and "inclusivity", since their politicization, shoulder a lot more subtext directly excluding certain political views.
An constructive environment doesn't need to check it's language. Maybe appeal to the conscience of the community. Worked pretty great in my opinion.
disclaimer: Only contributed tiny bits to OSS, but I believe this to be false:
> open source projects tend to have less diversity than other software organizations.
I also think that there isn't any real discrimination based on the idea or the word meritocracy. Ironically, although there is not much merit to meritocracy, there seems to be even less with inclusiveness and diversity.
>> open source projects tend to have less diversity than other software organizations.
You won't find some high school student or a stay at home mom have real impact in corporate software projects, but that's not the type of diversity that's measured these days.
> The notion of “meritocracy” can often obscure bias and can help perpetuate a dominant culture.
The link at Atlantic is dead at the moment but it's on wayback[0]. Atlantic asserts that you can't use performance as an objective metric because, in practice, when all other things equal, they are still observing discrimination.
I don't know what to think any more. I would like an objective measurement but I don't know if the data support it.
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20181004050116/https://www.theat...
It's like a ML algo. You take all people who have been put in prison, how long, and their faces. You also take a big subset of non-prison people - same thing. (You know where this is going). You build a classifier that, for a given face, estimates yes/no for prison and how long if yes.
Lo and behold, you show it darker face images, and prison estimation ratchets up and the estimated time served up up up.
Is the ML racist? Technically, yes. But it's observing racist underlying societal things.
Yeah, it's ugly. No, I don't have good answers, other than directly addressing when we catch stuff. But We (royal) don't see it as a problem. The status quo changes slowly.
In meritocracy, direct results should matter.
Given the current climate of tension in the English speaking world, I'm not going to comment publicly anymore on this issue. If you are genuinely intellectually curious as to my opinion, I'm happy to discuss it privately via email.
This is a common misunderstanding on the site.
In any case, it did inspire me to delete the Firefox app from my phone as another symbolic stunt.
Totally.
> or college degree
Absolutely.
> or management hierarchy
This one's less clear. On the one hand, obviously a toxic work environment can ruin anyone's performance, and accounting for that is important. On the other hand, most work has to happen in some kind of work environment, and to some extent we all have to learn how to work well with people around us. That's an important skill for any job.
More descriptive title, taken from the article text: "Mozilla has taken steps to discontinue using the word meritocracy as a way to describe governance and leadership structures."
It is obviously an active process, much like guarding democracy against demagoguery.
Attempts to subvert the system can usually be spotted early.
A person designing right secondary metrics that result in good primary endpoints is also meritorious.
The usual problems are either complacency, where meritorious people stop being so and are not being degraded, stagnation - lack of further development of merit or unnecessarily high barriers of entry.
Merit when developed should accrue over time, yet it should be possible for a "nobody" to get in at high levels.
People who are highly intelligent and motivated already reap the largest share of the rewards in society. Why do we have to go further than that and say that these people "deserve" more? A person who is born with low IQ or low conscientiousness (or both) "deserves less"? At least in a society where rewards are distributed somewhat randomly there is a chance for everyone to have a share. With a meritocracy, no such chance exists, since rewards are then determined by immutable aspects of a person's brain.
Maybe if we could build a society where decision-making was separate from reward, we could have a just meritocracy. But right now, as it is, those who make the decisions use their power to grant themselves all the rewards.
Or you could remove all possible reward, just so that there's no more incentive to do anything.
In a society where merit is rewarded perfectly, there's no incentive to do anything for all those who lack merit (i.e. the bottom 99%).
Regardless, merit != absolute perfection. Most people are bad at lots of things and good enough at one or two.
People at the bottom of such an arrangement have no incentive at all to participate in society.
You can argue that such an arrangement isn't realistic, that in real life you get to keep your job because you've made relationships with your coworkers. But then, that's not a meritocracy anymore, since nepotism/cronyism has taken the place of merit.
I think your definition of meritocracy is needlessly binary. People don't get assigned a merit number where they get to instantly supersede anyone with a lower one like sorting a list. What most people consider the word to mean is if you do good work you will be rewarded as such (more important role, more money etc.), not some king-of-the hill winner take all competition.
There's no question that this very often does not work out in practice, because life is messy. There is no such thing as pure anything when it comes to human relationships, but it's still a good idea to strive for.
It's certainly better than the alternative anyway....which is....actually what is the alternative? I've not heard anything besides "meritocracy is bad because not everyone benefits and some get screwed". What should we do, hand out positions and salaries based on random number generators? I think no matter what kind of hand wringing and word twisting people do you're always gonna end up back at a system of quasi-meritocracy combined with nepotism, cronyism and other human bullshit.
If you dig in further, past the simple buzzword, its a method of distributed control of power, controlling social acceptance and shrouding it as "merit".
What does "Meritocracy" come down to? Turns out women don't get 'merit'. They get 'social media' positions. They get the fuzzy fluffy jobs because that's all they're good for, regarding merit. Similar with African Americans. Pidgeonholed, natch. Older people, same - seriously they 'just can't keep up!'.
I read the Hacker Manifesto back in '89. I accepted it. I lived it. And as much as I wanted to accept "that we're all alike", Real Names and similar forced policies to disclose identity have poisoned this back to racism, sexism, nationalism, and ageism. I don't like it, and I don't like whatever pretty glitzy name is given to do this round of demeaning and ostracization.
Please provide citations.
https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/jun/24/...
The main takeaways here are:
1. Players have a range of qualities. It is nigh on impossible to rank them in a simple linear order, since strengths and weaknesses come in bundles, not as a single order of merit.
2. What makes someone a winner or a loser varies as they move up the ladder? Success criteria are context-dependent. Qualities suited to the top position may have little value in the middle, and vice versa. Indeed we may kill off the very leaders we need in middle echelon tournaments.
3. Something like the Peter Principle operates, where people are promoted to their level of incompetence. We advance people on yesterday's, not tomorrow's, competence. It is also striking that no one goes down. Losers just get stuck in their positions or exit the game.
4. People move ahead as much by luck as through performance. They get a good break, have a strong sponsor, make the right friends and get handed an opportunity to shine.
https://theconversation.com/women-in-tech-suffer-because-of-...
"In the U.S., women own 39 percent of all privately owned businesses but receive only around 4 percent of venture capital funding. Put another way, male-led ventures receive 96 percent of all funding." https://www.nawbo.org/resources/women-business-owner-statist...
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/02/06/27...
Women account for just 6 percent of the chief executives of the top 100 tech companies
There's plenty enough to dig further in this area. The numbers are damning, and show that "Turns out women don't get 'merit'." rather effectively. Well, unless you think that half of the population has 'fair' representation with only 4% VC funding, or 6% CEOs.
You've also shown that outcomes aren't equal. You haven't provided any reason to believe that the outcomes should be equal - in particular, that a comparable number of women are actually competing with the men. There's a fundamental assumption here that women have the same goals as men, and prioritize them against other life choices in the same way. There's a lot of reason to think that both of those things are false.
By subtly changing a few words, I've replicated the same sentiment against African Americans. And before that, the Irish immigrants. And Chinese immigrants.
You come from a superiority position, and that the "inferiors" don't really want nor care. I reject that worldview wholeheartedly.
Once again, you're continuing to make the assumption that all outcomes should, prescriptively, be equal for any demographic you might care to examine.
There's no reason to believe that everyone is identical. That idea is a religion to some people, but it's all based on faith with no real evidence. People are free to pursue different goals, and to prioritize different things.
For your argument to prevail, you've got to get past that as an assumption. You need to actually demonstrate that for completely equivalent cases, some demographics are being held back. That's remarkably difficult to do.
Otherwise, I can do this: women compromise 56% of college enrollees, with men only at 44%. There's clearly some kind of superiority position with an interest in keeping men out of college.
I'm not claiming that's a problem, but with your model of presumptive discrimination, you're going to have to come up with an explanation.
I think relative to the population at large it's reasonable to think a programming career is a +2stdev event in inclination and skill toward abstract systems (programmers are ballpark 5% of the working population).
I don't mean to suggest that the male variability hypothesis is all or even most of the story, but to me a 33% difference in variability, while substantial, doesn't sound impossibly large — and it suggests male:female ratios that are in line with what we see in the industry.
Well, hang on - some do, but not all. I've worked with plenty of very competent women programmers (Grace Hopper was a woman, after all), BUT they weren't exactly 50% of them. In fact, they were far fewer. I think most people have observed the same thing and the problem comes up when you try to figure out why, since, so far, there have only been two suggested possibilities: 1) women just aren't that interested in programming or, 2) the men are being sexist and keeping them out. Whenever somebody goes off on an "anti-meritocracy" rant, they're almost always _also_ insisting that the second suggestion is the truth, but there's really not that much evidence to support it.