The Convenient Fiction of Workplace Meritocracy

🧨 If your workplace were really a meritocracy, senior executives wouldn’t be 90% White.

Leaders, let’s be honest. “Meritocracy” is a convenient fiction that enables many of us to disavow our complicity in inequality. The idea that the best rise to the top ignores mountains of evidence showing how racism, sexism, economic inequality and other structural forces shape who gets hired, mentored, promoted—or pushed out.

Study after study shows that Black, Brown and Indigenous professionals are less likely to be seen as “leadership material,” even with the same qualifications.

📍Résumé studies prove that those with names that align with whiteness receive 50% more callbacks than those with “Black-sounding” names.
📍Black professionals need 8 more years of experience to reach the same level as their White counterparts.
📍Women of color hold just 4% of C-suite positions despite representing 20% of the workforce.

Pay gaps persist even when controlling for role and experience. And there are the unspoken rules: who gets invited to lunch, who is valued, who’s allowed to mess up, and who’s assumed to be competent.

Clinging to meritocracy myths denies history and presents systemic exclusion as personal failure. A form of victim-blaming, the ideology of merit says: "If you're not thriving here, it's your fault."

If we care about creating spaces where everyone can thrive, we must be willing to ask uncomfortable questions:

🔹 "Are we auditing our promotion processes for bias, or just hoping good intentions are enough?"
🔹 "When we say 'culture fit,' are we preserving excellence or exclusion?"
🔹 What steps are we taking to dismantle barriers rather than simply reward those who’ve already cleared them?

Let's stop pretending the system is fair and do the work of building true equity—and, by extension, true merit.

#WorkplaceEquity #Meritocracy #RacialJustice #Belonging