don't wanna spam the list. but here's a bit of serendipity. another piece crossed my newsfeed today
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/21/17687402/kylie-jenner-luck-human-life-moral-privilege this one is a longer read. but perhaps interesting for this list's subscribers, because builds quite nicely on the core ideas of the previous post specifically: > These recent controversies reminded me of the fuss around a book that came out a few years ago: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, by economist Robert Frank. (Vox’s Sean Illing interviewed Frank last year.) It argued that luck plays a large role in every human success and failure, which ought to be a rather banal and uncontroversial point, but the reaction of many commentators was gobsmacked outrage. On Fox Business, Stuart Varney sputtered at Frank: “Do you know how insulting that was, when I read that?” that outrage certainly mirrors some of the reactions I have witnessed when I have suggested that structural inequities (and not 100% "merit") have a role to play in someone's position of power/respect/success in tech On Wed, 20 Mar 2019 at 10:49, Naomi Slater <n...@tumbolia.org> wrote: > this article crossed my news feed today: > > > https://www.fastcompany.com/40510522/meritocracy-doesnt-exist-and-believing-it-does-is-bad-for-you > > here's a key takeaway: > > > [...] in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, > managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees > with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where > meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value. > > many aspects of this piece mirror something I wrote for Model View Culture > a few years ago: > https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-open-source-identity-crisis > > namely, that "the meritocracy" is a status quo supporting, hierarchy > legitimizing myth used to justify people's existing social status and > treatment > > I'll say what I've said before: it's long since time for us to critically > examine the way we use the concept of "meritocracy" at Apache (this is > especially true in 2019 given what we know about the lack of diversity at > the ASF) > > when I was writing about this in 2014, I was already a few years behind > the curve re discourse about culture and tech diversity. it's now 2019 and > even FastCompany is writing about it > >
