Gender, Race, and Meritocracy in Organizational Careers

This study helps to fill a significant gap in the literature on organizations and inequality by investigating the central role of merit-based reward systems in shaping gender and racial disparities in wages and promotions. The author develops and tests a set of propositions isolating processes of performance-reward bias, whereby women and minorities receive less compensation than white men with equal scores on performance evaluations. Using personnel data from a large service organization, the author empirically establishes the existence of this bias and shows that gender, race, and nationality differences continue to affect salary growth after performance ratings are taken into account, ceteris paribus. This…