I manage the summer-intern program for my team at a major global financial institution. Together with two other colleaguesfortune edge gaming, I decide to whom we wish to offer full-time positions at the end of the term. Our interns come from an array of socioeconomic and academic backgrounds and perform their duties with varying degrees of skill. Those coming from more well-to-do backgrounds appear to be performing better than those who come from less privileged backgrounds. When providing our final evaluations and ranking these interns, should we take their personal life circumstances into consideration? Or must we evaluate interns solely on job performance? We have been given no guidance on this from our program management. — Name Withheld
From the Ethicist:
We live in a class society. People who are rich in financial terms tend to be rich in cultural and social capital too: They have social assets, resources and connections. All these forms of advantage can contribute to an employee’s actual performance. But they can also contribute to the employee’s perceived performance. People often make judgments about the intelligence of speakers on the basis of their accents, for example, and one form of cultural capital is having the accent of the white, educated, Northern-coastal, middle classes.
So you can ask yourself whether your judgment about which of these interns is doing best has been shaped by features that don’t reflect the contribution they’re likely to make. You’re obviously alert to this possibility, because you write that the more privileged interns “appear” to be performing better; it’s worth thinking about whether you can identify evaluative measures that are less subject to this kind of bias. But another question is what weight to give to the fact that the objective contributions of the less privileged interns are made, to some extent, in spite of their disadvantages.
There are at least three considerations here. One has to do with what your interns’ current performance shows about their future performance. You might think, for example, that the more privileged interns who are doing well are drawing on resources — the kind provided by their family and their university — that will be less available to them as they continue with the firm. The less privileged interns, not having had so much to rely on, may be able to perform better in the future because they have less support to lose. A second consideration involves the possibility that — as some social scientists have argued — groups with members from a variety of backgrounds tend to be better at problem-solving than groups whose backgrounds are relatively homogeneous. If you advantage the already advantaged, your firm will be more upper-middle class and less diverse. The third consideration, as you’ll have anticipated, has to do with the role of decisions like yours in perpetuating social inequality. Simply advancing those who are doing best in part because of their privilege reinforces the unfairness from which they are already benefiting.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTNotice that the first two considerations are about doing what’s best for your firm. If class markers distort perceptions of an intern’s performance, it’s in the firm’s interests to reduce this distortion. If a well-managed diverse workplace is, in fact, more creative, then the firm has an interest in securing one. But trying to avoid replicating economic and social inequality is about making a contribution to the commonweal. To be sure, your decisions will have at most a marginal impact. Only concerted action by many parties could achieve significant change. All the same, you should not participate in injustice, even if your nonparticipation makes little difference to it.
Follow The New York TimesFind us on Instagram for the best of our visual journalism and beyond.Join our WhatsApp Channel for breaking news, games, recipes and more.Connect with us on Facebook to get the best of The Times, right in your feed.Plenty of people thinkfortune edge gaming, of course, that our society should be meritocratic, in the sense that its rewards should relate to individual talent and effort, rather than, say, parental resources. My own view is that most debates about meritocracy are confused. Talent and effort are both things that arise not just from our innate capacities but also from our circumstances; it’s muddled to suppose that talent and effort can be contrasted with parental inputs. Some people work hard in part because they were raised in ways that made it likelier that they would want to work hard. Your well-honed musical or athletic skills may have arisen, in part, because your parents invested in developing them long before you yourself had any ambitions. Once again, hierarchies have a way of reproducing themselves.