Abstract
People who work to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in organizations often invoke the distinction between intent and impact to foster better interpersonal and intergroup relationships across difference. We may intend well when we say or do something, yet the impact of those actions on a person with whom we are interacting may be experienced in a completely different way, given their context and background. At its core, Misconceiving Merit: Paradoxes of Excellence and Devotion in Academic Science and Engineering reveals the gap between intent and impact when it comes to the standards of objectivity and merit within academic science as the basis for sound scientific practice. The intent of these standards is to produce good science, but authors Mary Blair-Loy and Erin A. Cech argue these standards also lead to biases and inequities that persist in academic science, hindering scientific innovation and progress.
Through this volume, Blair-Loy and Cech argue that commitments to uphold objectivity and merit, commitments that are so deeply held that they often become moralized across the field, paradoxically reinforce the structures that produce the inequitable outcomes faced by people from minoritized backgrounds in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. As a brief aside, the authors (and I) often use the term “academic science” interchangeably with STEM to distinguish the book’s focus on academia from other aspects of the STEM workforce, but the book includes experiences across all STEM fields. The authors take the position that STEM needs to shift its focus from individual explanations for these inequities, such as explicit and implicit biases held by individual practitioners, to a broader gaze on professional culture. They point out that although individual biases do contribute to the problem, this framing of the problem is too easily used to argue that a few individual “bad apples” are spoiling the bunch. Rather, through this book, Blair-Loy and Cech highlight how individual “bad apples” are more likely the most visible examples of a much larger, more systemic problem with the professional culture in STEM. Even the most well-meaning academic scientists committed to reversing these inequities are subject to the same systemic pressures to uphold professional beliefs in objectivity and merit as constituted in the field.
Blair-Loy and Cech break the professional culture in STEM into two primary operating schemas they highlight as undergirding how merit is defined in STEM: the work devotion schema and the scientific excellence schema. The work devotion schema reveals how academic scientists believe one earns merit in their selected STEM field through exhibiting intense diligence to their work. This persistence is typically demonstrated through giving one’s research the highest priority, even over personal matters, working long hours through multiple failures and successes. The scientific excellence schema is viewed as how well one can produce “groundbreaking” work that helps push one’s field forward. Scientific excellence encompasses asking new and innovative questions as well as promoting one’s work throughout the field. A scientist who has shown the persistence and determination to reach successful outcomes in research and has produced groundbreaking results is worthy of the merit afforded within STEM fields.
The authors use these two schemas to organize their argument that many of the inequities faced by minoritized people in STEM are direct consequences of these professional beliefs. For example, the work devotion schema has come to have a detrimental impact on parenting scientists broadly, and mother scientists more specifically, as even the most well-meaning academic scientists often see work devotion and family devotion as in too great a tension to reconcile. The scientific excellence schema is harmful to most minoritized scientists as many of the qualities and criteria that scientists associate with excellence are culturally ascribed to white, heterosexual men, who are viewed as the norm within academic science against whom everyone else is measured. Excellence is within grasp for white, heterosexual men, and the claims to excellence of minoritized scientists are often viewed with skepticism. Coupled with these issues is the belief that any discussion of difference introduces politics into science in a way that tarnishes the disinterested and objective approach scientists view as essential for conducting the best science. The pressure to depoliticize STEM, then, is harmful to all minoritized scientists, and especially LGBTQ scientists who are pressured to keep their identities concealed as the very presence of minoritized scientists is often seen as politicizing science.
After describing the two schemas and how these inadvertently harm minoritized scientists, the authors then reveal the ways scientists paradoxically rely on their commitments to objectivity and merit to rationalize inequities within STEM fields. Blair-Loy and Cech had described earlier how scientists were often resistant to efforts to diversify STEM, especially those efforts that focused on historical exclusion, arguing these goals were too ideologically driven and introduced politics into science. Yet the way that objectivity and merit have become moralized in STEM paradoxically results in confirmation bias among these very scientists when assessing inequities faced across STEM fields. Reproducing results observed in several other studies, Blair-Loy and Cech found the academic scientists they interviewed also dismissed the results of peer-reviewed research published in some of the most highly regarded scientific journals, disregarding this research as biased or politically motivated. In other words, the “paradox” invoked in the book’s title is that academic scientists believe STEM should remain disinterested—except when the research gaze is cast back on the practice of science itself. The book then closes with a chapter that highlights some possibilities for change within STEM that are less focused on reducing individual bias and more about how to reveal the hidden systemic biases embedded within the culture of STEM.
In general, I found the authors’ arguments to be quite compelling, between their thorough review of the existing literature and the comprehensiveness of the case study that constituted the empirical research conducted for this book. The book makes an important contribution, especially through its attention to the experiences of LGBTQ faculty in STEM, an emerging area of research within this field in which the second author has been at the forefront. The authors provide an integrated argument that helps unpack how people experience different inequities based on their different social identity group memberships, and at the same time how these inequities are still systemically bound together through the hegemonic professional culture in STEM that privileges white, heterosexual men.
The book did lead me to wonder, though, how these findings might differ at other kinds of colleges and universities beyond large, elite research universities. I do not mean to argue that the authors needed to include more institutions for greater generalizability or more compelling results, and the authors provided a solid justification for their selection of a research site. Rather, I wonder how these scientists’ experiences compare to those academics who assumed a position at a teaching-focused university, or even a community college, where research is less of a central focus of their responsibilities—a topic for a separate volume. Altogether, this book advances an argument that offers a more systemic explanation for the inequities facing minoritized people in STEM fields, meaning that diversity training may only be part of the solution to move STEM fields forward.