"The world is a meritocracy" is a bit of a straw man, because who really believes in the Platonic ideal of a meritocracy?<p>The steel-plated version would be a recognizable descendant of the Middle Ages: as the king is annointed by God, our leaders are too, in direct proportion to their merit. So Donald Trump would be 1,000 times more meritorious than the average person, as confirmed by his net worth.<p>No one believes this nonsense.<p>What happens is, individual <i>companies</i> believe they are meritocratic - not the world at large, which they rightfully recognize as beyond their control.<p>The problem here is that you can use the meritocratic argument against the meritocracies cited in the article.<p>> They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations.<p>Well... in a meritocracy, your performance evaluation <i>is</i> your merit. They should be interchangeable; there should be no discrepancy between them. Ideally if my performance evaluation is 1.5 times better than yours, consistently, my salary should be too.<p>I think it's fine to drop the language around 'meritocracy' and just reduce it to incentives: the equivalent of working at a factory, where someone who makes 2x as many widgets makes 2x as much money. Basically these are this department's goals and the people who hit them, based on these markers, make more.<p>Now I know there are different ways to measure that. I know bias can creep in. But, c'mon: if we both make the same number of widgets as measured by performance evaluation, there is no reason for me to make more than you based on my gender, which is the differentiating factor here and deeply anti-meritocratic, after all.<p>So if you drop the (apparently, empirically, problematic) meritocratic language, but keep the merit-based indicators and - this is crucial! - stick to them, it seems like you can resolve the issue.