Shaping Meritorious Selves: Female Scientists and the Paradox of Objectivity in American Science

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 9: Women in Academia

Abstract

Despite decades of research documenting gender inequalities in science, we know relatively little about how women scientists themselves understood and navigated meritocratic ideals during the pivotal decades when both feminist movements and scientific meritocracy were ascending. This paper examines a fundamental paradox: why did women increasingly embrace meritocratic principles even as evidence mounted that meritocracy disadvantaged them?

Drawing on archival interviews with 70 women scientists conducted between 1980-1985 by Columbia sociologists Jonathan R. Cole and Harriet Zuckerman, I trace how three generational cohorts constructed their professional identities in relation to changing institutional contexts. Women who received PhDs before 1950 navigated explicit discrimination through strategies of individual exceptionalism. Those entering during the feminist movement's rise (1950-1969) paradoxically embraced meritocracy more strongly as the solution to inequality even as structural barriers persisted. Women benefiting from Title IX and affirmative action (1970s-1980s) faced intense pressure to prove both their individual merit and the legitimacy of equity policies, leading to the most thoroughgoing internalization of meritocratic standards.
The analysis reveals that when institution-based discrimination was delegitimized in the second half of the 20th century, rooted in Cold War ideological contests, meritocracy became the only legitimate principle around which women could structure their professional selves. This historical perspective demonstrates how meritocratic rhetoric intensified precisely when formal barriers fell, providing new language to justify persistent inequalities once explicit discrimination became illegitimate.

This research contributes to understanding how disadvantaged groups come to embrace disadvantaging systems, how workplaces construct gendering mechanisms through ostensibly neutral evaluation systems, and why contemporary diversity efforts often focus on "fixing" women rather than questioning metrics themselves.

Author

• Daria Franklin, Columbia University