From Lies to Truth
The Stories We've Been Told About Merit
There are stories we are told from the time we’re young:
Education is your ticket out of poverty.
Work hard and you’ll climb the ladder of success.
Be a law-abiding citizen and you’ll have nothing to fear.
I came across these examples while preparing for my fellowship at the University of Chicago. They were written by Crystal Hayling, Executive Director of the Libra Foundation, in an article about philanthropy and the danger of assuming universal truths when lived experience tells a very different story.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them.
Not because they are entirely false, but because they reveal something deeper.
The stories we tell ourselves as a society are often not universal truths. They are experiences that happen to be true for some people, some of the time. Yet we repeat them as if they apply equally to everyone.
That made me look deeper into the stories women professional women have been and are currently being told?
We’ve been told to wait our turn.
We’ve been told our time will come.
We’ve been told that if we simply work hard enough, our talent will be recognized.
We’ve been told organizations reward merit.
We’ve been told to let the system work
We’ve been told that promotions naturally go to the most qualified person.
We’ve been told that if we don’t succeed, we simply haven’t worked hard enough.
These ideas sound fair on the surface. Some of them even sound reasonable or that they could be true. But for many women, they have never reflected reality.
Women continue to outperform expectations while being paid less, promoted less often, funded at lower rates, and significantly underrepresented in positions of power. If our systems truly rewarded merit alone, we would expect leadership to look very different than it does today.
I know this because I have lived it.
Throughout my career in technology, I consistently met or exceeded my business objectives. I volunteered for assignments that others avoided. I moved my family around the world to build businesses and lead global teams. I delivered revenue targets, developed high-performing organizations, and accepted challenges that carried significant personal and professional risk. Yet I was repeatedly told that the timing wasn’t right. That the organization wasn’t ready. That the market wouldn’t accept a woman in the role.
Meanwhile, I watched male colleagues, sometimes peers, sometimes individuals I managed—receive larger raises, bigger stock awards, promotions, and recognition for work that often originated with women on the team.
No one ever said outright that my gender was the problem. Instead, the message was quieter.
Be patient.
Keep proving yourself.
Don’t make an issue of it.
Many women recognize those words because they have heard some version of them throughout their careers.
This isn’t about blaming individual men. Many have also faced significant barriers. Nor is it about suggesting that every woman has had the same experience. It is about questioning a system that continues to describe itself as merit-based while producing remarkably predictable outcomes.
Look at the leadership of Fortune 500 companies.
Look at venture capital funding.
Look at boardrooms.
Look at Congress.
Despite decades of progress, the people making the biggest decisions remain overwhelmingly white and male.
If merit alone determined who advanced, would our leadership still look this homogeneous? Or have we become so comfortable with the story that we mistake it for truth? The danger of these stories is not simply that they are incomplete. It is that they allow inequality to be explained away. When we insist everyone has an equal opportunity, then anyone who falls behind must simply not have worked hard enough. The burden shifts from examining systems to questioning individuals.
That is how inequality survives.
Crystal Hayling’s words were written in the context of philanthropy, but I believe they apply much more broadly.
Progress begins when we stop confusing inherited narratives with universal truths. For women, that means acknowledging that the promise of merit has too often been different from the reality of opportunity. Recognizing that truth is not about assigning blame. It is about creating systems that finally live up to the values we claim to hold.
We cannot build a more equitable future while clinging to stories that no longer match the world as it is.
Every meaningful change begins the same way: By replacing the stories we’ve been told with the truths we’re finally willing to acknowledge.