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Why companies that call themselves meritocracies don't always pay equally

Managers who see their pay system as fair tend to favor men over equally qualified women. The gap stays hidden until leaders check the numbers

Andrey Popov / Getty Images

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Managers who are told their company pays on merit alone give men bigger bonuses than women who do the same work. The promise of fairness is what produces the bias. Once managers are convinced the system rewards performance and nothing else, they stop scrutinizing their own decisions, and prejudice they would otherwise catch slips into the pay.

The finding comes from an experiment that MIT professor Emilio Castilla and Indiana University sociologist Stephen Benard ran with 445 people who had all managed real employees. The researchers split the managers into two groups and gave each one a different description of the same company. Then they asked everyone to read the employees' performance reviews and divide a bonus pool among them. Two of those employees, a man named Michael and a woman named Patricia, had identical records. Managers who read that the company paid on performance alone gave Michael $46 more than Patricia. Managers who read a description that never mentioned fairness gave Patricia $51 more than Michael. The only difference was whether the company called........

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