As public sector organisations around the world enact strategies to progress gender equality, managers are forced to navigate the apparent conflict between making employment decisions on individual-level ‘merit’ and considering the collective constraints and disadvantage that occur along gender lines. In this paper, we investigate how managers’ understandings of merit contribute to this tension. Analysing data collected in focus groups with 273 mid-level public sector managers in four Australian jurisdictions where efforts to promote gender equality were actively under way, we found that many managers adhered to a highly individualised understanding of merit which precluded them from considering gender or addressing gendered inequality in their employment decisions. Only a small proportion of managers who believed that creating a more representative bureaucracy was a legitimate public sector objective were able to justify considering a candidate's gender as a source of merit. We argue that public sector organisations seeking to promote gender equality should focus managers’ attention on the benefits of achieving a more representative bureaucracy and give managers greater normative and regulatory certainty about how to assess and apply merit in that context.

中文翻译：

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最佳人选还是最佳组合？公共部门管理者如何理解绩效原则

随着世界各地的公共部门组织制定促进性别平等的战略，管理人员被迫在根据个人“优点”做出就业决定与考虑沿性别线出现的集体限制和劣势之间的明显冲突中驾驭。在本文中，我们调查了管理者对绩效的理解如何促成了这种紧张关系。通过对澳大利亚四个司法管辖区的 273 名中层公共部门管理人员的焦点小组收集的数据进行分析，这些司法管辖区正在积极促进性别平等，我们发现许多管理人员坚持高度个性化的优点理解，这使他们无法考虑性别或解决问题就业决策中的性别不平等。只有一小部分认为建立更具代表性的官僚机构是合法的公共部门目标的管理人员能够证明将候选人的性别视为优点的来源。我们认为，寻求促进性别平等的公共部门组织应将管理人员的注意力集中在实现更具代表性的官僚机构的好处上，并在如何评估和应用这种情况下为管理人员提供更大的规范和监管确定性。