We think we treat everyone the same because the moral law is within us.
One of the arguments that comes up most often in debates about equal opportunities between women and men is that women do not want to take advantage of the opportunities that fate so often gives them. The elegant version reveals that women are more focused on relationships and values, on work-life balance – and this conscious choice is the basis for their lower career advancement, on average. The more brutal version highlights women’s lack of ambition and competitive spirit (as well as many other shortcomings). In short: we are governed by a meritocracy, so the best get the jobs – and it is no one’s fault that the best are, more often than not, men. And quotas and other instruments to support women are fundamentally harmful because they only distort a system that works well.
I like these arguments because you can examine whether they are relevant to the data. This was done, for example, by Emilio Castilla (Massachusetts Sloan Institute of Technology) and Stephen Bernard (Indiana University), who conducted an experiment among nearly 450 MBA students. The participants in the “game” had an average of five years of management experience, including employee compensation and personnel decisions. In the experiment, they had to decide how to divide bonuses among employees and whether to promote or fire them.
Managers were randomly divided into groups belonging to two companies: the first emphasized the role of meritocracy (e.g., compensation should reflect results), the second emphasized managers’ freedom of decision-making (e.g., salary increases and promotions are decided by direct superiors). For the purposes of the study, Castilla and Bernard wrote several employee profiles and randomly decided whether a given profile was described with a female or male name.
