Breaking the Gender-Merit Link

We’ve got a great group of women at work supporting Martha Coakley.  One of our teammates, MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, has just been published at Huffington Post.  Please surf over to HuffPo, read the entire post, and send the link to a friend.  Meanwhile, here’s my favorite part:

Why is it that when someone suggests gender diversity as an asset of a job candidate, the reply is often “Oh no, I’m only interested in merit”. Yet name some other quality needed for the position, and the idea of merit is assumed, not questioned.

Take for example the selection of Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. Some people said, “we need a judge from the Midwest in order to have a more balanced and diverse bench.” I never heard anyone recoil in horror and reply “Oh no, I’m only interested in merit. ” One assumes, of course, that it would be a meritorious candidate from the Midwest!

Obama wanted a candidate with “empathy”. Did anyone believe he wanted a person with empathy but no merit? They might have disagreed with the need for empathy, but they never suspected that empathy precluded merit.

So why do people jump to the conclusion that if a woman is running, we have to worry about her merit. Linking these two things plays right into the stereotype that is what gender (and race) bias is – namely that women (blacks) really are inferior. Otherwise, why would the subject even come up? Linking merit to gender perpetuates an unconscious bias that has no basis in fact. Stereotypes applied to groups spill over to taint our judgment of individuals who belong to that group.