Building a true meritocracy means removing barriers, not ignoring them

In the late 18th century, mathematician and physicist Joseph-Louis Lagrange made a shocking discovery: his star student, a Monsieur Le Blanc, was actually a woman.

Lagrange taught at France’s École Polytechnique, which allowed students to receive lecture notes and submit work without attending the university in person. This was particularly beneficial to Sophie Germain, who longed to study mathematics despite objections from her parents. She took up the identity of a lapsed student and might have got away with it, but Lagrange noticed the vast and sudden improvement in Le Blanc’s work and demanded to meet in person.

Germain isn’t the only person to note how the name we use changes the way we are perceived. As psychologist Keon West explains here, experiments using identical job applications show that those with names assumed to belong to a Black person are less successful than those with names thought to belong to a white person.

In recent years, many organisations have adopted measures to combat the biases that lead to these outcomes, such as removing names from job applications. These measures fall under the umbrella of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Now, however, US President Donald Trump has ordered government agencies to dismantle DEI programmes, promising in his 20 January inauguration speech that society would be “merit-based”.

Some DEI initiatives have firmer grounding in evidence than others. As the résumé test demonstrates, merit alone isn’t enough to overcome people’s biases, and a number of studies have shown that anonymising applications does tend to improve outcomes for disadvantaged groups. On the other hand, unconscious bias training, in the form of one-off sessions that aim to make employees aware of snap judgements they may make about people based on their race and gender, has been found to make little difference in changing people’s behaviour.

Trump’s heavy-handed approach to DEI, based in ideology rather than evidence, is unlikely to produce his desired outcome of a meritocracy. Instead of developing an organisation where the best people are encouraged to flourish, the current efforts seem to be fostering a culture of fear, with government workers being warned of “adverse consequences” for failing to identify and end DEI work.

Thankfully for Germain, there were no such consequences. Lagrange accepted her for who she was and championed her mathematical development. Despite this, she still used the Le Blanc pseudonym in some correspondence, most notably with mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who, on discovery of her true identity, wrote that she had “nobler courage, quite extraordinary talents, and superior genius”. If we want more Germains to flourish, we must acknowledge and address the barriers they face, not pretend that they don’t exist.