Headline, September 05 2024/ ''' INTERNS - JOBS - INTEREST '''

''' INTERNS - JOBS-

 INTEREST '''

'' I'M PICKING INTERNS TO OFFER JOBS. DO I TAKE PRIVILEGE INTO ACCOUNT? ''

I manage the summer-interns program for my team at a major global financial institution. Together with two other colleagues, I decide to whom we wish to offer full-time positions at the end of the term.

Our interns come from an array of socioeconomic and academic backgrounds and perform their duties with varying degrees of skill. Those coming from well-to-do-backgrounds appear to be performing better than those who come from less privileged backgrounds.

When providing our final evolutions and ranking these interns, should we take their personal life circumstances into consideration?

Or must we evaluate interns solely on job performance? We have been given no guidance on this from our program management. [ Name Withheld ]

WE LIVE IN a class society. People who are rich in financial terms tend to be rich in cultural and social capital too : They have social assets, resources and connections. All these forms of advantage can contribute to the employee's actual performance.

But they can also contribute to the employee's perceived performance. People often make judgments about the intelligence of speakers on the basis of their accents, for example, and one form of cultural capital is having the access of the white, educated, Northern-coastal, middle classes.

So you can ask yourself whether your judgment about which of these interns is doing best has been shaped by features that don't reflect the contribution they're likely to make.

You're obviously alert to this possibility, because you write that the more privileged interns '' appear '' to be performing better; it's worth thinking about whether you can identify evaluative measures that are less subject to this kind of bias.

But another question is what weight to give to the fact that the objective contributions of the less privileged interns are made, to some extent, in spite of their disadvantages.

There are at least three considerations here. One has to do with what your interns' current performance shows about their future performance.

You might think, for example, that the more privileged interns who are doing well are drawing on resources - the kind provided by their family and their university - that will be less available to them as they continue with the firm.

The less privileged interns, not having had so much to rely on, may be able to perform better in the future because they have less support to lose.

A second consideration involves the possibility that - as some social scientists have argued - groups with members from a variety of backgrounds tend to be better at problem-solving than groups whose backgrounds are relatively homogeneous.

If you advantage the already advantaged, your firm will be more upper-middle class and less diverse.

The third consideration, as you'll have anticipated, has to do with the role decisions like yours in perpetuating social inequality. Simply advancing those who are doing best in part because of their privilege reinforces the unfairness from which they are already benefiting.

Notice that the first two considerations are about doing what's best for your firm. If class markers distort perceptions of an intern's performance, it's in the firm's interests to reduce this distortion.

If a well-managed diverse workplace is, in fact, more creative then the firm has an interest in securing one. But trying to avoid replicating economic and social inequality is about making a contribution to the common weal.

To be sure, your decisions will have at most a marginal impact. Only concerted action by many parties could achieve significant change. All the same, you should not participate in injustice, even if your nonparticipation makes little difference to it.

Plenty of people think, of course, that our society should be meritocratic, in the sense that its rewards should relate to individual talent and effort, rather than, say, parental resources.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Jobs, Interns and Policies continues. The World Students Society thanks The New York Times.

With most respectful dedication to the Corporate World, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the world.

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