Meritocracy sounds positive until you examine its dark historySociological research shows that companies explicitly promoting themselves as meritocracies inadvertently foster greater bias. Photograph: iStock Thu Aug 06 2026 - 06:00 • 5 MIN READHard work will always be rewarded. That’s what we’re taught in school. If you learn how to study and apply yourself, good grades and quality jobs will follow. This simple formula is the path to success. Once we enter the workforce though, we soon realise that the people who get the promotions and the bonuses may not necessarily be the ones who are best at the job. Instead, they might be the manager who exceeds her sales targets every quarter but doesn’t care about the human cost of staff burnout. Or the financial controller who plays golf with the top executives every month, leaving all the work to his underlings. This reality check can be a tough, demotivating blow to ambitious young workers. Is meritocracy a harmless fairy tale we tell children to motivate them or a dangerous excuse that reinforces the status quo?Let’s start with the term “meritocracy”, which has a dark and largely unknown history. Michael Young’s 1958 dystopian book The Rise of the Meritocracy coined the phrase as a satirical warning. Young’s work describes a horrific society where the ruling class uses IQ and testing to oppress the working class under the false promise of fairness to justify systemic inequality and intense social division. In Ireland we’ve seen this psychological horror film before. From 1820 to 1850, British lawyer George Combe used the pseudoscience of phrenology to “prove” Irish people were mentally inferior by measuring the size and shape of our skulls. He wasn’t alone in using such results to reinforce racist stereotypes against the Irish, which often justified poor working and living conditions.Today, many of Silicon Valley’s tech bros and some US politicians have similarly embraced unscientific dogmas, like IQ fetishism, high-T testosterone level obsession and a belief that some groups are genetically more intelligent than others. It is a fixation that has driven a trend in polygenic embryo screening for high IQ and biohacking protocols to boost testosterone. Sounds like fun for all involved.Last month US defence secretary Pete Hegseth introduced a mandatory annual testosterone screening policy for all military personnel aged 30 and older – including women – framing it around a “High-T Department of War” vision to maximise combat readiness, physical strength and a masculine warrior ethos.[ Let them eat crumbs: Growing wage inequality is bad for both workers and businessesOpens in new window ]Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian has spent years investigating how this cult of IQ reinforces racist and sexist ideology and where it came from. In his most recent books, Crackup Capitalism (2023) and Hayek’s Bastards (2025), he critiques meritocracy as a mythology used to justify deep social, racial and economic hierarchies.Meritocracy is a myth used to reinforce the status quo at work too. What makes that myth so durable is that it seems so logically appealing. Of course talent should matter. Naturally effort should be rewarded.Marketing a mythDespite its dubious history, the meritocracy myth has been embraced in the workplace and is widely used across corporate branding. Companies across technology, finance and banking market themselves as places where advancement is based strictly on individual talent, effort and measurable results rather than status or connections. Big Tech giants have even built their corporate myths on engineering meritocracy. Tech leaders sell the dream that anybody from anywhere can pitch a feature or find a bug, and that promotion relies purely on technical data and peer reviews. All so logical, right?Dig a little deeper into any of these workplaces in Ireland or abroad and you’ll find pipelines that remain skewed towards a handful of well-known secondary schools. In the US most of those at the top are likely to have attended elite universities. Overwhelmingly, these engineers seem to be white, middle-class English-speaking men.[ What top CEO pay and gender pay gap reporting tell us about Irish businessOpens in new window ]Sociological research, such as the Meritocracy Paradox conducted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), shows that companies explicitly promoting themselves as meritocracies inadvertently foster greater bias. Other research shows that managers who believe most in meritocracy were found to be the most biased. They tended to base promotion and pay decisions on bias, not pure merit.If you believe that everyone starts on a level playing field, it’s easy to think that your hard work got you where you are today.Systemic barriers tied to gender, race, class, disability – and even postcode or surname – can limit access to education, jobs and resources and make it harder for people to succeed. Ignoring your own privileges makes it easy to believe your success is because you are exceptional. Slobodian calls it the “illusion of genius”.Fixing biasMerit-based hiring, promotion and pay can improve performance and perceived fairness, research has found, but in practice it doesn’t work when the criteria you’re expected to meet are vague or unchecked. Reward systems often reproduce bias unless there’s strong accountability and transparency in decision-making. Work needs to be done here. The PayGap.ie website shows we still haven’t put women in the workplace on a level playing field as pay, bonus and promotion gaps persist across most industries in Ireland.Financial and status rewards at work are still largely influenced by bias and not on merit. In study after international study, women have been shown to be evaluated and paid differently than men, even when their credentials and performance are the same. Gen AI has this same bias baked in, ensuring that gender discrimination and not meritocracy, determines even who can gain entry to the job market. Another interesting byproduct of the meritocracy myth is an entire ecosystem designed to fix women. Women are apparently “broken” and need help learning how to speak, act, dress, ask questions, write emails, ask for promotions, negotiate time off and so much more. Women need to be more like men before they’re promoted and paid properly, I guess?The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up – And Then Pushes Them Down by Stefanie O’Connell challenges this narrative and the meritocracy myth.“A few women in positions of corporate power are not a solution to the intractable problems of systemic discrimination, any more than an aesthetic of pink workspaces and overly simplified advice like ‘just ask for what you’re worth’, are solutions for gender inequality.“What this hyper-individualistic and largely aesthetic style of ‘empowerment’ really does, is pit us against one another while overlooking the systemic biases and misogyny that actually holds all of us back.”Organisations need to stop marketing meritocracy and then blaming women and minorities for failing to advance. Invest more time instead in identifying and calling out the systems that hinder progression and fix them. The economic reality is that workplaces need more types of people to fill jobs. Warren Buffett, not a man typically associated with feminism, explored this topic many years ago in a letter to shareholders. Reflecting on America’s economic success, he wrote: “But that’s not the half of it – or, rather, it’s just about the half of it. America has forged this success while utilising, in large part, only half of the country’s talent. For most of our history, women – whatever their abilities – have been relegated to the sidelines. Only in recent years have we begun to correct that problem.”IN THIS SECTION