In the US, what is an allowable work expense is decided by the IRS, which explains that ‘Generally you cannot deduct personal, living, or family expenses.’129 But what counts as a personal expense is debatable – which is where Dawn Bovasso comes in. Bovasso is one of the few female creative directors in US advertising. She is also a single mother. So when her firm announced that it was hosting a directors’ dinner, Bovasso had a decision to make: was this dinner worth the $200 it would cost her for a sitter and travel?130 Bovasso’s male colleagues on the whole had to do no such mental accounting: yes, men can be single parents, but they are a rare beast. In the UK, 90% of single parents are women.131 In the US the figure is over 80%.132 In Bovasso’s case, her male colleagues were able to just check their calendar and accept or decline. And most of them accepted. In fact not only did they accept, they also booked the hotel next to the restaurant, so they could drink. And unlike her sitter, this cost was claimable on company expenses.
The implicit bias is clear: expense codes are based on the assumption that the employee has a wife at home taking care of the home and the kids. This work doesn’t need paying for, because it’s women’s work, and women don’t get paid for it. Bovasso sums it up: ‘You can get $30 for takeout if you work late (because your wife isn’t there to cook you dinner) or $30 for Scotch if you want to drink your face off, but you can’t get $30 for a sitter (because your wife is at home with the kids).’ In the event, Bovasso was able to get her company to cover the cost of her childcare – but as she points out, ‘these have been exceptions I’ve had to ask for’. Which is women all over: always the exception, never the default.
And in any case, not all employers will grant these exceptions. The Fawcett Society’s 2017 report on local government in England and Wales found that despite regulations dating from 2003 that call for ‘all councils to offer an allowance to cover the caring costs that councillors incur when fulfilling their role’, in reality, provision is patchy.133 Some councils don’t reimburse caring expenses at all, and most that do only pay a ‘contribution’. Rochdale Borough Council’s scheme ‘pays just ￡5.06 per hour, and specifically states that it is “a contribution rather than full reimbursement of carers’ expenses” – although this important caveat is notably not made for travel expenses’. Adding to the sense that this is a matter of priorities rather than resources, most local-government meetings take place in the evening (when childcare is most likely to be needed), and although it is standard practice in many countries from the US to Sweden for councillors to remotely attend or vote at meetings, current law does not allow for this cheaper alternative.
It is abundantly clear that the culture of paid work as a whole needs a radical overhaul. It needs to take into account that women are not the unencumbered workers the traditional workplace has been designed to suit, and that while men are more likely to fit into this automaton ideal, increasing numbers of them no longer want to. After all, it is simply a fact that none of us, including businesses, could do without the invisible, unpaid work carers do. So it is time to stop penalising them for doing it. Instead, we must start recognising it, valuing it, and designing the paid workplace to account for it.
CHAPTER 4
The Myth of Meritocracy
For most of the twentieth century there were no female musicians in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. There were a couple of blips in the 1950s and 60s, when a woman or two was hired, but those aside, the proportion of women sat stubbornly at zero. But then all of a sudden, something changed: from the 1970s onwards, the numbers of female players started to go up. And up.
Turnover in orchestras is extremely low. The composition of an orchestra is fairly static (at around one hundred players), and when you’re hired, it’s often for life; it’s rare that a musician is fired. So there was something remarkable going on when the proportion of women in this orchestra grew from a statistical 0% to 10% in a decade.
That something was blind auditions.1 Instituted in the early 1970s following a lawsuit, blind auditions are what they sound like: the hiring committee can’t see who is playing in the audition, because there is a screen between them and the player.2 The screens had an immediate impact. By the early 1980s, women began to make up 50% of the share of new hires. Today, the proportion of female musicians in the New York Philharmonic stands at over 45%.3
The simple step of installing a screen turned the audition process for the New York Philharmonic into a meritocracy. But in this, it is an outlier: for the vast majority of hiring decisions around the world, meritocracy is an insidious myth. It is a myth that provides cover to institutional white male bias. And, dishearteningly, it is a myth that proves remarkably resistant to all the evidence, going back decades, that shows it up as the fantasy it most certainly is. If we want to kill this myth off, we’re clearly going to have to do more than just collect data.
The fact that meritocracy is a myth is not a popular one. Around the industrialised world, people believe that not only is meritocracy the way things should work, it’s the way things do work.4 Despite evidence suggesting that, if anything, the US is less meritocratic than other industrialised countries,5Americans in particular hold on to meritocracy as an article of faith, and employment and promotion strategies over the past few decades have increasingly been designed as if meritocracy is a reality. A survey of US firms found that 95% used performance evaluations in 2002 (compared to 45% in 1971) and 90% had a merit-based pay plan in place.6
The problem is, there is little evidence that these approaches actually work. In fact, there is strong evidence that they don’t. An analysis of 248 performance reviews collected from a variety of US-based tech companies found that women receive negative personality criticism that men simply don’t.7 Women are told to watch their tone, to step back. They are called bossy, abrasive, strident, aggressive, emotional and irrational. Out of all these words, only aggressive appeared in men’s reviews at all – ‘twice with an exhortation to be more of it’. More damningly, several studies of performance-related bonuses or salary increases have found that white men are rewarded at a higher rate than equally performing women and ethnic minorities, with one study of a financial corporation uncovering a 25% difference in performance-based bonuses between women and men in the same job.8
The myth of meritocracy achieves its apotheosis in America’s tech industry. According to a 2016 survey, the number one concern of tech start-up founders was ‘hiring good people’, while having a diverse workforce ranked seventh on the list of ten business priorities.9 One in four founders said they weren’t interested in diversity or work-life balance at all. Which, taken together, points to a belief that if you want to find ‘the best people’, addressing structural bias is unnecessary. A belief in meritocracy is all you need.
Actually, a belief in meritocracy may be all you need – to introduce bias, that is. Studies have shown that a belief in your own personal objectivity, or a belief that you are not sexist, makes you less objective and more likely to behave in a sexist way.10 Men (women were not found to exhibit this bias) who believe that they are objective in hiring decisions are more likely to hire a male applicant than an identically described female applicant. And in organisations which are explicitly presented as meritocratic, managers favour male employees over equally qualified female employees.
Tech’s love affair with the myth of meritocracy is ironic for an industry so in thrall to the potential of Big Data, because this is a rare case where the data actually exists. But if in Silicon Valley meritocracy is a religion, its God is a white male Harvard dropout. And so are most of his disciples: women make up only a quarter of the tech industry’s employees and 11% of its executives.11 This is despite women earning more than half of all undergraduate degrees in the US, half of all undergraduate degrees in chemistry, and almost half in maths.12