It is widely believed that meritocratic employment practices reduce gender inequality by limiting managers’ reliance on nonmerit factors, such as biases. An emerging stream of research, however, questions the belief, arguing that meritocratic practices often fail to reduce inequality and may paradoxically increase it. Despite these opposing predictions, we still lack convincing empirical findings to adjudicate between them. Typically relying on data from a single organization or industry, most previous studies suffer from limited generalizability and cannot properly account for the large variation in the implementation of merit-based reward systems across organizations, let alone identify the origins of the variation. We attempt to overcome the limitations by constructing large-scale linked employer–employee data and by investigating the impact of merit-based systems on different components of compensation. Analyzing our panel data on 400 large Japanese companies and 400,000 employees of these companies over 12 years, we found evidence in support of the meritocracy paradox. The gender gap in bonus pay was greater, not smaller, in workplaces with a merit-based system compared to workplaces without it. But this paradoxical expansion of the gender gap was observed only in bonus pay but not in total compensation. We further found that a transition to merit-based systems has varying impacts on different employee groups; it widened the gender pay gap for young workers but reduced the gap for managers. Our research contributes to understanding gender inequality in times of shifting employment relations and the rise of meritocracy.

中文翻译：

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工作中的精英管理？：基于绩效的奖励制度和性别工资不平等

人们普遍认为，任人唯贤的雇佣做法通过限制管理者对非绩效因素（如偏见）的依赖来减少性别不平等。然而，新兴的研究流对这一信念提出了质疑，认为精英管理的做法往往不能减少不平等，反而可能反而会加剧不平等。尽管有这些相反的预测，我们仍然缺乏令人信服的实证结果来判断它们。通常依赖于来自单个组织或行业的数据，大多数先前的研究都存在有限的普遍性，并且无法正确解释跨组织实施基于绩效的奖励系统的巨大差异，更不用说确定差异的根源了。我们试图通过构建大规模关联的雇主 - 雇员数据并通过调查基于绩效的系统对薪酬不同组成部分的影响来克服这些限制。通过对 400 家大型日本公司和这些公司 400,000 名员工 12 年的面板数据进行分析，我们发现了支持精英悖论的证据。与没有绩效考核制度的工作场所相比，绩效考核制度的工作场所的奖金薪酬性别差距更大，而不是更小。但这种性别差距的矛盾扩大只在奖金薪酬中观察到，而不是在总薪酬中观察到。我们进一步发现，向基于绩效的系统过渡对不同的员工群体有不同的影响；它扩大了年轻工人的性别薪酬差距，但缩小了管理人员的差距。