The Principle Of Merit Resolves Many Gender Issues

The Principle of Merit Resolves Many Gender Issues

  

Meritocracy is a political philosophy that holds that certain things of value, such as economic goods or governmental positions, should be vested in individuals on the basis of talent, effort, ethics and achievement, rather than factors such as heredity or wealth, sexuality, race, gender, political allegiance or age. Advancement in such a system is based on performance, as measured through examination or demonstrated achievement.

Throughout history, many attempts have been made to create structure for the conduct of organizations and nations. Most of these attempts have been failures. Only a few of these efforts have created even minimal efficacy. The scarcity of merit based decision making is rare. I suspect that merit based policies are counter intuitive and driven by embedded human psychology and corruption.

I first became aware of the need for merit based decision making because of my involvement in a scholarship program in an organization to which I belonged. Are organization has given national and global scholarships to gifted youths. The students are required to write a short essay about their goals for life, they do not need to reveal what they plan on doing with the money we provide. A committee in are organization evaluates the students essays; this committee is made up of long time educators who are very committed to proper English. Once the student’s essays are evaluated a decision is made on who receives the scholarship money.

These essays are usually very well written which makes it difficult to make a decision. We began to notice the female evaluators tend to award the scholarships to the female students and we also notice that ethnicity had influence. Students with last names that were obviously to particular cultures received scholarships from evaluators that shared that same ethnicity. Oddly, man evaluators also tended to give scholarships to females student. So, are leaders decided that are present policy was unfair. So the solution was to edit the essays prior to the time there were given to the evaluation committee. Words that designated gender or ethnicity were eliminated, and a number was assigned to each essay before the essay was given to the evaluation committee. Now these scholarships were given on merit based decisions.

This experience made me aware that are culture has many decision that are driven by gender and ethnicity rather than merit. It seemed obvious that decisions should be based on performance, Intelligence and experience. We could eliminate unfair hiring and salary by doing merit based decision making. Politicians could be chosen and paid on the bases of merit thus eliminated political corruptions. Many laws and the justice system are unfair. If legal decisions are made on the decision making merit then we could eliminate the gender bias in court decisions. There are many examples of policies that are unfair that could be corrected by merit based decision making.